Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Paine, Thomas and Rickman , Thomas Clio (1908), The Cause of the Yellow Fever , The life and writings of Thomas Paine, Retrieved on 2011-12-16Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: biography Memes
16 DEC 2011
Thomas Paine and George Washington Conduct an Experiment
The muddy bottom of rivers contains great quantities of impure and often inflammable air (carbureted hydrogen gas), injurious to life; [begin page 309] and which remains entangled in the mud till let loose from thence by some accident. This air is produced by the dissolution and decomposition of any combustible matter falling into the water and sinking into the mud, of which the following circumstance will serve to give some explanation. In the fall of the year that New York was evacuated ...They light aflame methane gases stirred up from the Millstone River as part of a bet.