"Spinal column" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vesicle containing gas, situated immediately beneath the spinal column in most fish, and often communicating by a tube with the gullet. It is the homologue of the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... by Elliot Smith, Wood Jones, Ruffer and Rietti. The majority of the lesions appear to have been the common osteo-arthritis, which involved not only the men, but many of the pet animals kept in the temples. In a much higher proportion apparently than in modern days, the spinal column was involved. It is interesting to note that the "determinative" of old age in hieroglyphic writing is the picture of a man afflicted with arthritis deformans. Evidences of tuberculosis, rickets and syphilis, according to these authors, have ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... neck, as represented in a plate of the animal, there being some long hair behind the horns and a little between the shoulders, but none on the back of the neck. The animal has a very short tail also—so short it can hardly be seen in life. According to M. Severtzoff there is a dark line above the spinal column from the shoulders to the loins; a white anal disc surrounds the tail; this disc above is bordered by a rather dark line, but below it extends largely over the hinder parts of the thighs, shading gradually into the brown ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... his arms over his broad chest, and striking crosswise, until the tips of his fingers almost met upon the spinal column of his back, Snowball succeeded in resuscitating the circulation; and then, perceiving it was full time to take his turn at the helm, ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... hands, but was in the hug of a bear. He also felt that if it were not for the cost of mail which he had on, in case of having to fight with the sword, the German giant would have crushed his ribs and perhaps the spinal column too. The young knight lifted him a little from the ground, but Arnold lifted him up higher still, and gathering all his strength he tried to throw him to the ground so that he might not be able to ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... again as they come round to the bridge of the fork, but it isn't the tire picking them up that fills me with lynx-eyed vigilance and alarm; it is the dreaded possibility of taking a header among these awful vegetables that unnerves one, starts the cold chills chasing each other up and down my spinal column, and causes staring big beads of perspiration to ooze out of my forehead. No more appalling physical calamity on a small scale could befall a person than to take a header on to a cactus-covered greensward; millions of miniature needles would fill his tender hide with prickly sensations, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... professors. Now I led my auditors into the inmost laboratories of Nature, and revealed, in plant and animal, the fine affinities that regulated her processes of nutrition. Now I traced some delicate nervous filament from the spinal column of the amphioxus to the cerebral hemisphere of the mammifer. Now I disclosed the ramifying canals in the vast system of circulation, mounting from the spongy network of the mollusk and the sluggish lymphatic of the reptile to the brilliant, bounding ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... could have seen, if you had examined it closely, a pair of bright, beady eyes, and a dark little thread of a backbone that was always curled up like a horseshoe because there wasn't room for it to lie straight. But along the outside of the curve of each spinal column a set of the tiniest and daintiest muscles was getting ready for a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull all together. And one day, late in the winter, when the woods were just beginning to think about spring, the muscles in one particular ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... again. The ball had evidently missed the vertebrae and spinal column. His crashing, thunderous roar of pain smothered instantly the reechoing report of the rifle and stifled the instinctive cry that had come to Ben's lips. He was a forester; and he had known of old what havoc a mortally wounded bear can wreak in a few seconds of life. In that strange, vivid ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... thus savouring her face, and they were still ten yards from the pit-shaft, she suddenly disappeared from his vision, as it were by a conjuring trick. He had a horrible sensation in his spinal column. He was not the man to mistrust the evidence of his senses, and he knew, therefore, that he had ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... me, while I was engaged in slumber. He must have thought that I was your father, and that we rolled in luxury at home all the time, and that it was a common thing for us to have our boots blacked by menials. When I left the car this porter brushed my clothes till the hot flashes ran up my spinal column, and I told him that he had treated me square, and I rung his hand when he held it out toards me, and I told him that at any time he wanted a good, cool drink of buttermilk, to just holler through our telephone. We had the sociable at our house last week, and when I got home ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the axial rod, or the chorda dorsalis. There is a long, round, cylindrical rod of cartilage which runs down the longer axis of the vertebrate embryo; it appears at an early stage, and is the first sketch of the spinal column, the solid skeletal axis of the vertebrate. In the lowest of the vertebrates, the amphioxus, the internal skeleton consists only of this cord throughout life. But even in the case of man and all the higher vertebrates ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... 'Pa you have killed me, but I forgive you,' and then rolled around, and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth to make foam. Well, Pa, was all broke up. He said, 'Great God, what have I done? I have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy, do not die?' I kept chewing the soap and foaming at the mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them out, and clutched my hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the stummick as he bent over ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... had he cried out, "Come to my arms, my long-lost brother!" or were a strawberry-mark actually found, I could not have been surprised. As it was, his frenzied tugs at the lapel of my coat threatened its immediate destruction, and my spinal column ached under his demoniac slaps on the back, before ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Sam's canoe wisely explained to him how, if they were possibly able to get him alongside of the deer, to try to spear him across the spinal column as near the head as possible. They also took the precaution to have a couple of guns and axes handy where, in case of emergency, ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... gigantic fan —and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead. The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are .. copied verbatim from my right arm, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... into the shadows. He was not afraid, as he recalled his sensations afterwards; but a strange little thrill seemed to be racing up and down his spinal column. ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... for some time, until the doctor, who, from his height, was obliged to stoop at a very acute angle, suddenly sprang upright; and with one hand propping his spinal column, exclaimed, "Oh, that one's joints were but provided with holes to ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... I'll take up with your proposition," said Hippy hastily. "There is something about the tone of your voice that makes my spinal column vibrate with nervous apprehension. I think I had better confine my conversation strictly to Nora. She is sympathetic and also ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... spinal marrow, lodged within the spinal canal, or hollow of the backbone, is continuous with the brain anteriorly, and terminates in a point in the sacrum (that part of the spinal column which immediately precedes the tail). The spinal cord gives off branches at each of the spaces between the segments of the backbone. These branches form nerve trunks which carry both sensory and motor impressions and impulses. The spinal cord is a grand nerve trunk to carry messages to or from ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... wishing to examine it closely, but anxious, also, not to alter its position. On the nape of the neck was a large stain of blood, like a black wen and as big as a five-shilling piece, just above the last vertebra of the spinal column. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... his head dropped forward rather suddenly, so that his clean-shaven chin touched his tie-pin, and this without a feeling of sleepiness warranting the relaxation of the spinal column. He sat up suddenly on each occasion and threw back ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... In extending the spinal column, the shoulders must not be raised, but held loosely in normal position and forced back until the points of the shoulders are at right angles with an anterior-posterior plane running ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... said he, "that thou hast sent to-day for me, since I shall start to-morrow for Beneventum, whither the noble Vatinius has summoned me to make a trial, in presence of Caesar, of a certain Syphax, the most powerful negro that Africa has ever produced. Dost thou imagine, lord, how his spinal column will crack in my arms, or how besides I shall break his ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... central system and the specialized end-organs of the senses. The sympathetic system, which is found as a double chain of nerve connections joining the roots of sensory and motor nerves just outside the spinal column, does not seem to be directly related to consciousness and so will not be discussed here. A brief description of the nervous system will help us better to understand how its parts all work together in so wonderful a way to accomplish ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... an ideal rider, man wants but little here below, nor is it at all likely he will want that little long. He wants—or rather, needs— a skull of best spring steel; a spinal column of standard Lowmoor; limbs of gutta-percha; a hide of vulcanised india-rubber; and the less brains he has, the better. Figuratively speaking, he should have no brains at all; his thinking faculties should be so placed as to be in ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... never sets you laughing explosively. Such laughter is only on the surface; but you can hardly read a page of his without feeling a general sense of mirth suffused as it were through every limb, and the cheek can laugh no more than the spinal column. So, too, Turgenef never sets you a weeping, but the sadness he feels he sends from his pages, circulating through your blood, and while the eye will not indeed drop a tear, for such grief is likewise mostly on the surface, the breast will heave a sigh. And Tolstoy never fires ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... six pounds. It strikes like a triple lash upon the naked back of the sufferer. It does not plough or tear up the flesh like the knout, but the skin of course breaks under the heavy blows inflicted upon the spinal column and the sides. Phthisis is a common complaint with those who have been subjected to the punishment of the plete, the strokes frequently detaching the viscera from their living walls. In order to give more force to the blow, the executioner takes a leap and run, only striking as he reaches his victim. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... precise, quick walking to and fro, which continued for ages of time. Lastly, the footsteps receded; something dropped, not heavily, but rather in a manner gently subsiding, and a groan (or was it a moan, a tired suspiration?) wakened in Hugo's spinal column a curious, strange thrill. Then silence, complete, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... be told where in the brains these first principles are, and how they become derivative. Anatomy shows where in the brains these first principles are; it teaches that there are two brains; that these are continued from the head into the spinal column; that they consist of two substances, called cortical substance and medullary substance; that cortical substance consists of innumerable gland-like forms, and medullary substance of innumerable fiber-like forms. Now as these little glands are heads ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the sun, but it did not cover a twentieth part of the ground. In several hollows the mud had frozen and presented a rough surface to our wheels. Our telyaga had no springs, and when we went at a rapid trot over the worst places the bones of my spinal column seemed engaged in a struggle for independence. A thousand miles of such riding would have been too much for me. A dog belonging to Madame Radstvenny's house-keeper followed me from Krasnoyarsk, ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... years of age, though he was only fifty; and this premature old age had destroyed the honorable likeness. His tall figure was slightly bent,—either because his labors, whatever they were, obliged him to stoop, or that the spinal column was curved by the weight of his head. He had a broad chest and square shoulders, but the lower parts of his body were lank and wasted, though nervous; and this discrepancy in a physical organization evidently once perfect ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... unlikely, in view of the nature of her injuries. The bullet, after traversing the left lung, lodged in the spinal column. After such a wound Mrs. Heredith was not likely to be conscious ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... I've got to seek pleasure by ramming my spinal column up into my skull and crowding my ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain. It is equally true that on some islands, such as Malaita, the profit and loss account of social intercourse is calculated in homicides. Heads are a medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely valuable. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... be placed over the spinal column and the other moved about over the course of the colon, or one over the spine and the other ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... but they are required in such concentrations as to render their battle use impracticable. But the second type, of which stovaine, the new synthetic drug, is a good example, produces its effects in very small concentration. A few drops injected into the spinal column are sufficient to prevent all movement for a number of hours. We cannot expect to obtain the conditions of the operating table on the battle-field, but chemicals which are effective in very small quantities or concentrations may find another channel ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... ground face downward. Kneeling on his shoulders, with the left hand gripping his neck and the right clutching his hair and scalp, he pulled back the wretched man's head till it was a miracle that the spinal column was ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... some fishes with vertebrated tail fins the fin is symmetric, and this seems to be the primitive type. In others the tail fin is unsymmetric: the backbone runs into the upper lobe, leaving the two lobes of unequal size. In most modern fishes (the teleosts) the tail fin is not vertebrated: the spinal column ends in a broad plate, to which the diverging fin ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... Egyptians mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that it shall hold more firmly. But before man had any artificial dwelling the same contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance had been employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column. India-rubber is modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic like that, and serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that serves in our mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia. The dome, the round ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... consists, first, of a sub-kingdom of animals which possess a spinal column, or backbone, and which are known as vertebrate animals. Such are all beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. There are also a variety of remotely allied marine organisms known as tunicates, sea-squirts, or ascidians (Fig. 2). There is, further, an immense group of arthropods, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the Mediterranean, excavations of the Vence Cave (Alpes-Maritimes) brought to light a number of dead arranged in a circle as if about to take a meal in common. The bodies were crouching in the position of men sitting on their heels; the spinal column was bent forward and the head nearly touched the knees. In the centre of this strange group were noticed some fragments of pottery and the remains of a large bird, a buzzard probably. Perhaps its death among the corpses was a mere accident.[288] The dolmens of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... true of several groups of Vertebrata which have lived through a considerable range of time, that the endoskeleton (more particularly the spinal column) of the older genera presents a less ossified, and, so far, less differentiated, condition than that of the younger genera. Thus the Devonian Ganoids, though almost all members of the same sub-order as Polypterus, and presenting numerous important resemblances ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... of gravitation, it would all fall if the tendency were not counteracted by a corresponding pressure. This pressure is almost universally being sustained by our girls at the hips, and it comes just where the trunk has no longer, except in the spinal column, any bony support, depending alone on ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... The weird odors of it still fill my nostrils; the sinister portrait of it is still before my eyes. It is the Chinatown of London—Limehouse. Down in the dregs of the town—with West India Dock Road for its spinal column—it lies, redolent of ways that are dark and tricks that are vain. Not only the heathen Chinee so peculiar shuffles through its dim-lit alleys, but the scum of the earth, of many colors and of many climes. The Arab and the Hindu, the Malayan and the Jap, black men from the Congo and fair men ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... passed round the rear of his load to the nigh side of his team. I caught only a few of his last words;—"take your backbone for a for'ard X." I snapped my thumb and finger at him, though not lifting my arm from my side. The human spinal column, with its vertebrae, for an axle-tree of a wagon! And yet, I immediately thought, the poor negro's back is truly "the for'ard X" of the great wagon of our American commerce. ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... from almost imperceptible degrees to the most loathsome extent that it is possible for animal tissue to harbor. Its brain may be so invaded by the syphilitic parasites that it can never attain any degree of mentality; its spinal column maybe so involved that paralytic conditions will surely result; and if these nerve centers escape special involvement, other organs may be affected, such as the stomach, bowels, and liver; if these escape, the ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... been called the spinal column of personality. "The will in its relation to life," says an English writer, "may be compared at once to the rudder and to the steam engine of a vessel, on the confined and related action of which it depends ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... thing is sufficient to cause a cold shudder to play down the spinal column of John Bull. But the American people will never play the game of commerce in ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... always like touching the twip of me pwatent leather gaitaw just beneath the lowermost extreme of his spinal column, and elevating his dangling supporters a few feet in the air, before pwopelling him into ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... skull and of the backbone were laid down in a fashion quite different, and that it was impossible to regard both skull and backbone as modifications of a common type laid down 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... delicate straight line appearing on the surface of the growing layer of cells is the base of the embryonic spinal column. Around this the whole embryo develops in an intricate process of cell division and duplication. One end of the Primitive Trace becomes the head, the other the tail, for every human being has a tail at this stage of his existence. The neck is marked by a slight depression; the body ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... of this revelation, John sat there open-mouthed, feeling the nerves of his body twitter like so many sparrows perched upon his spinal column. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Knowledge of the Laws of Health, and of the Human System, to Females. Construction of the Human Frame. BONES; their Structure, Design, and Use. Engraving and Description. Spinal Column. Engravings of Vertebrae. Exercise of the Bones. MUSCLES; their Constitution, Use, and Connection with the Bones. Engraving and Description. Operation of Muscles. NERVES; their Use. Spinal Column. Engravings and Descriptions. Distortions of the Spine. Engravings and Descriptions. ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... and had no protection against it. It seems to seize one violently from the very beginning and sends up one's temperature extremely high, which produces a fearful exhaustion, with pains in the ribs, arms and spinal column. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... still with feet a-sprawlin', An' his eye shows lots of white, An' he kinks his spinal column, An' his hide is puckered tight, He starts risin' an' a-jumpin', An' he strikes when you get near, An' you cuss him an' you thump him Till you get him by ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... kitchen, whetted it to a good point, and went and hid behind a big cottonwood tree near the moving-picture theatre. When his wife with the child and her father came out, he stepped up behind the old man and drove the knife into the back of his neck to the hilt, severing the spinal column. Afterward he looked at the dead man for a moment and at his wife, sitting on the ground shrieking, then went home and washed his hands and changed his shirt—for blood had spurted all over him—walked to the police ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson |
