"Vertebral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... caught fowling-pieces and every other article that came along. He was dressed very tastefully, too, as if he knew he was a good-looking fellow. He had on a new blue woolen Havre frock, with a new silk handkerchief round his neck, passed through one of the vertebral bones of a shark, highly polished and carved. His trowsers were of clear white duck, and he sported a handsome pair of pumps, and a tarpaulin hat bright as a looking-glass, with a long black ribbon streaming behind, and getting entangled every now and then in the rigging; and he had gold ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... are, in a state of nature almost continually in action both by night and by day. They either walk, creep, or advance rapidly by prodigious bounds; but they seldom run, owing, it is believed, to the extreme flexibility of their limbs and vertebral column, which cannot preserve the rigidity necessary to that species of movement. Their sense of sight, especially during twilight, is acute; their hearing very perfect, and their perception of smell less so than in the dog tribe. Their most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... dispose of small anomalies, such as the acceptance, without cant, of certain forms of the shop, euphemized as the store, but containing the same old vertebral counter. Not all forms. Dry-goods were held in respect and chemists in comparative esteem; house furnishings and hardware made an appreciable claim, and quite a leading family was occupied with seed grains. Groceries, on the other hand, were harder to swallow, possibly ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... startled! The plate before him showed the Princess's face in all its beautiful contour, but only dimly veiling a ghastly death's-head below. There was the whole bony structure of the head and the eyeless sockets; even the graceful, swan-like neck showed the articulated vertebral column that supported it in all its hideous reality. The beautiful shoulders were there, dimly as in a dream—but beneath was the empty clavicle, the knotty joint, the hollow sternum, and the ribs of a ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... conclude this chapter by a brief view of the Fauna of the higher vertebral animals. In the region of the coast I have found twenty-six species of mammalia, only eight of which belong exclusively to the coast. Sixteen of the other species are to be found in the mountains or in the forests. The relation of ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... former of whom is said to have "damned himself to everlasting fame" by inventing the nickname of "la science moussante" for Evolutionism (One is reminded of the effect of another small academic epigram. The so-called vertebral theory of the skull is said to have been nipped in the bud in France by the whisper of an academician to his neighbour, that, in that case, one's head was a "vertebre pensante."),—to say nothing of the ill-will of other powerful members of the Institut, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... between his teeth shall be burned out; his feet upon the familiar corner of the mantel at that automatically calculated altitude which permits the weight of the upper part of the body to fall exactly upon the second joint from the lower end of the vertebral column as it rests in the comfortable depression created by continuous wear in the cushion of that particular chair to which every honest man who has acquired the library vice sooner or later gets attached with ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... something akin to baby joyousness, and the small, warped figure, so low that it walked under my dropped and level hand, acquiring security of step and erectness of bearing. I knew little of the treatment required for spinal disease, but common-sense taught me that, in order to effect a cure, the vertebral column must be relieved as much as possible from pressure, and allowed to rest. So I persuaded him to lie down a great part of the time, and contrived for him a little sustaining brace to relieve him when ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... percussion-cap. The shoulder-blades, the elbows, the wrists, and the finger-joints are all made to fire off their muffled volleys; and then, placing one knee between our shoulders, and clasping both hands upon our forehead, he draws our head back until we feel a great snap of the vertebral column. Now he descends to the hip-joints, knees, ankles, and feet, forcing each and all to discharge a salvo de joie. The slight languor left from the bath is gone, and an airy, delicate exhilaration, befitting the winged Mercury, takes ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the vertebral column of the New York transit system; with it as a basis, the operators formed the Metropolitan Street Railway Company in 1893, commonly known as the "Metropolitan." They organized also the Metropolitan Traction Company, an organization which enjoys an historic ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... this cetacean are so plentiful in the interior of Clarke County, Alabama, as to be characteristic of the formation. The vertebral column of one skeleton found by Dr. Buckley at a spot visited by me, extended to the length of nearly seventy feet, and not far off part of another backbone nearly fifty feet long was dug up. I obtained evidence, during a short excursion, of so many ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... in introduction of the esophagoscope. The cricoid cartilage is pulled backward against the cervical spine, by the cricopharyngeus, so strongly that it is difficult to realize that the cricopharyngeus is not inserted into the vertebral periosteum instead of into the ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... the matrix removed from the opposite side; this has not been covered with Bioplastic. The bones lie in great disorder, except that some parts of the roof of the skull are associated, and the middle section of the vertebral column is approximately in place. The bones of the left forelimb are close together but not in a natural position. The tail, pelvis, hind limbs and right forelimb are missing. Nearly all the bones present are broken, distorted by crushing, incomplete and scattered ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton
... pericardium was found single, covering both hearts. The digestive organs were double and separate as far as the lower third of the ilium, and the cecum was on the left side and single, in common with the lower bowel. The livers were fused and the uterus was double. The vertebral columns, which were entirely separate above, were joined below by a rudimentary os innorminatum. There was a junction between the manubrium of each. Sir Astley Cooper saw a monster in Paris in 1792 which, by his description, must have been very ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... legend) Christ descended under the weight of Pilate's judgment, and which all Christians must for ever ascend on their knees; before you is the city gate which opens upon the Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some monstrous mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple flats and dells of the Campagna and the glowing blue of the Alban Mountains, spotted with their white, high-nestling towns; while to your left is the great grassy space, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... right along the axis of the body. The spinal column and the skull start from the same primitive condition, whence they immediately begin to diverge. It may be true to say that there is a primitive identity of structure between the spinal or vertebral column and the skull; but it is no more true that the adult skull is a modified vertebral column than it would be to affirm that the vertebral column is a ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... middle; the vertical portion is formed by the larynx and pharynx, the horizontal by the mouth. The length of the resonator, from the vocal cords to the lips, is about 6.5 to 7 inches (vide fig. 12). The walls of the vertical portion are formed by the vertebral column and the muscles of the pharynx behind, the cartilages of the larynx and the muscles of the pharynx at the sides, and the thyroid cartilage, the epiglottis, and the root of the tongue in front; these structures ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... some mysterious connection between incipient spinal trouble and the collecting of autographs. Which superinduces the other is a question for pathology. It is a fact that one out of every eight applicants for a specimen of penmanship bases his or her claim upon the possession of some vertebral disability which leaves him or her incapable of doing anything but write to authors for their autograph. Why this particular diversion should be the sole resource remains undisclosed. But so it appears to be, and the appeal to one's sympathy ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... after the removal of the arrow. Among the remarkable recoveries from injuries of the neck is that mentioned by Boerhaave, of a young man who lived nine or ten days after receiving a sword-thrust through the neck between the 4th and 5th vertebrae, dividing the vertebral artery. Benedictus, Bonacursius, and Monroe, all mention recovery after cases of cut-throat in which the esophagus as well as the trachea was wounded, and food protruded from the external cut. Warren ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... they often did, in a state of refraction. 'Why, Juniper,' they'd say, 'what's amiss? Are you grieving after Mr Frank?' I could only nod dissent; my heart was too full. But I mustn't be too long, a- keeping you too, sir, under the vertebral rays of an Australian sun. I just couldn't stand it no longer—so I gets together my little savings, pays my own passage, sails across the trackless deep to the southern atmosphere—and here I am, to take ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... "tall Cointet" wanted all that the bourgeoisie finally obtained by the Revolution of 1830. In his heart he hated the aristocrats, and in religion he was indifferent; he was as much or as little of a bigot as Bonaparte was a member of the Mountain; yet his vertebral column bent with a flexibility wonderful to behold before the noblesse and the official hierarchy; for the powers that be, he humbled himself, he was meek and obsequious. One final characteristic will describe him for those who are accustomed ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac |
