150 - On Spontaneous Combustion. 
A canvass recently painted with flax-seed oil, and then dried and 
rolled close, took fire after being three hours exposed to the sun on 
the deck of the Schr. Olive, at Troy, New York. (August, 1820.) 
A piece of old packing-sheet, which had lain long about an oil and 
color warehouse, and was besmeared with different kinds of vegetable 
oils, on being thrown behind some casks pretty much confined from 
the air, inflamed.—Edinburgh Phil. Jour. vol. vii. p. 219. 
A cask of oat meal left from May to August in a kitchen in Glas- 
gow, caught fire and was totally consumed together with the barrel. 
—Thomson’s Annals, vol. xvi. p. 390. 
A parcel of hops well dried, were put into a home-spun cotton 
gown and placed on a heap of cotton seed; after three months they 
inflamed. Cotton it was remarked has frequently been known to 
take fire spontaneously in a moist and heated atmosphere.—Milton, 
N. Carolina paper. (1824.) 
Certain ochres ground in flax-seed oil, inflamed during the : act of 
trituration. 
Alder charcoal has taken fire in the warehouses in which it was 
stored.* One of sixty three casks of lampblack on board the ship 
Catherine, bound to India from England, ignited, but was discovered 
by the fumes before it had burst into a flame.— Old Monthly Mag. 
Lon., 1827, p. 91. 
Wet Cotton.—The ship Earl of Eldon, in August, 1834, was set 
on fire, by reason of having shipped cotton in the rain at Bombay. 
A similar occurrence took place in 1836, on board a vessel which 
had taken in cotton at Apalachicola, Florida, during rain. 
A piece of red cedar about two ounces in weight, broken in two, 
and laid upon the shelf of the store of Mr. Adam Reigart in Lan- 
caster, Penn. inflamed after two years had elapsed, in June, 1834. 
It was part of a tree found in excavating the deep cut of the rail 
road, at the ‘‘Gap in the Mine Ridge,” Lancaster County, thirty 
feet below the surface. ‘The combustion was proceeding so rapidly, — 
that the shelf would have been in a few minutes on fire, and it evi- 
dently commenced in the interior of the wood, as some of the outer 
fibres were sound.—Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, vol. xiii, 
p- 399. 
Haussman relates that soveeal dozens of skeins of cotton, dyed 
red, and impregnated with an alkaline solution of alumina, with ex- 
* B.G. Sage. Walker’s Archives, vol. iii., p. 80. 
