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wrote these lines, it is said, while in a chemistry class: Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in odium Of having discovered sodium. This was the first of a verse type known as a clerihew, which is a pseudo-biographical verse of two rhymed couplets in which the subject’s name makes one of the rhymes. It became a genre of humorous poetry, although not many people can recite another example of a clerihew.
The nitrate turns to nitrite, which reacts with a protein in the meat called myoglobin, producing a pinkish color. The reaction also produces minuscule amounts of something called nitrosamines, which may be cancer-causing. Today, the amount of nitrates is limited by law to what seems to have been deemed an acceptable risk for the oddly unquestioned goal of making ham reddish.
Nehemiah Grew, a British plant physiologist who is credited with being the first human ever to witness and document plants having sex, studied the celebrated health spring water of Epsom in Surrey, England. He isolated a salt, magnesium sulphate, ever after known as Epsom salt. Epsom salt is now used not only medicinally but in the textile industry, for explosives, in match heads, and in fireproofing.
The Maratha rulers’ attitude toward Orissa was reminiscent of a Chinese proverb: “Governing a state is like cooking small fish. It has to be done with a very light touch.” The British practiced this light touch neither in governance nor in cooking.
