"Excrescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stood eyeing each other. The elephant, although much the larger, knew his antagonist well. He had met his "sort" before, and knew better than to despise his powers. Perhaps, ere now, he had had a touch of that long spit-like excrescence that stood out from ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Jack River. The houses are ranged in the form of a square; none of them exceed one story in height, and most of them are whitewashed. The ground on which it stands is rocky; and a small garden, composed chiefly of sand, juts out from the stockades like a strange excrescence. A large, rugged mass of rocks rises up between the fort and Playgreen Lake, which stretches out to the horizon on the other side of them. On the top of these rocks stands a flagstaff, as a beacon to guide ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... is quite clear that the transeptal chapel, being nothing more than an excrescence from the wall of a nave or aisle, is a feature which may be treated with some freedom. Its width and length are dependent upon the convenience and will of the builders. The north chapel of the aisleless ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... won't—that is, I can't throw one away. Supposing there's no truth in what I hold About the need of trial to man's faith, Still, when you bid me purify the same, To such a process I discern no end. Clearing off one excrescence to see two, There's ever a next in size, now grown as big, That meets the knife: I cut and cut again! First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? Experimentalize on sacred things! I trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain To stop betimes: ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... agricultural development; and he was bound in return to perform arduous and complicated duties. How far he performed them well is another question. At least, he did whatever was done in the way of governing, and therefore did not sink into a mere excrescence or superfluity. I must try to point out certain results which had a material effect upon English opinion in general and, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... The curious excrescence on the bill of the drake nukta or comb-duck is now much enlarged. This betokens the approach of the nesting ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... a young palmiste tree. This is a tree of the palm order, exceedingly stately and graceful, growing sometimes to the extraordinary height of eighty feet. From the roots upwards, it has not a single branch or shrubby excrescence, but grows beautifully smooth and straight, tapering towards the top. At its top, an abundance of the richest and most beautiful leaves spread out in graceful symmetry, and bend down on all sides, forming a figure like an umbrella; while the young leaf, still firm and compact ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... to have taken possession of the very keystone of the bridge, which I hope is in no danger of falling.' L—n seemed a little confounded at this remark, and assured him it was nothing but a common excrescence of the cuticula, but that the bones were all sound below; for the truth of this assertion he appealed to the touch, desiring he would feel the part. My uncle said it was a matter of such delicacy to meddle with a gentleman's nose, that he declined the office — upon which, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... upon her head, while the other, mangled and torn into a serried red excrescence, formed the termination of a broad, ragged scar which began at the corner of her mouth, giving her face the expression of a fiendish grin that belied the green glare ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... nose he subjected his bonds to a critical examination. Each rounded steel band ran unbroken except for the smooth, almost jointless hinge and the small lock which sat perched on the back of the wrist in a little rounded excrescence like a steel wart. In the flat center of each lock was a small keyhole and alongside of it a notched nub, the nub being sunk in a minute depression. On the inner side, underneath, the cuffs slid into themselves—two notches on each showing where the jaws might be tightened to ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... apparent that these could not affect the freedom and security which, coupled with the natural advantages of the country, afforded the fullest scope and strongest stimulant to industrial activity. The extinction of slavery was the cutting away of an excrescence: the wound under a proper treatment was sure to heal, and even under unwise treatment Nature has been doing her work until only a scar remains. Painful, too, as was the operation, its success has given the clearest proof of the health and vigor of our system, thus ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... spandrils of the gateway and in many other parts of the building might be seen the arms of the family; while the tall twisted stacks of chimneys, which appeared to spring from all parts of the roof, were carved and built in such curious and quaint devices that they were rather an ornament than an excrescence. When you entered the quadrangle, you found one side solely occupied by the old hall, the huge carved rafters of whose oak roof rested on corbels of the family supporters against the walls. These walls were of stone, but covered half-way ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... of his time, delivering that last speech, with its incomparable rhythm! I like to think that he gave the spectators an idea that Valentine's self-sacrifice for Angelica was nothing but a bold device, a calculated effect; otherwise the sacrifice is an excrescence in this comedy, which, popular and broad though it be, is cynical in Congreve's manner throughout. One is consoled, however, by the pleasant fate of the ingenious Mr. Tattle and the intriguing Mrs. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... the shell remains distended, smooth, intact, of the purest white, with the circular lid hanging to the mouth of the door of exit. The egg of the bird breaks clumsily under the blows of a wart-like excrescence which is formed expressly upon the beak of the unborn bird; the egg of the Cricket, of a far superior structure, opens like an ivory casket. The pressure of the inmate's head is ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... brick dustbin overfilled till its rickety wooden lid gaped to show the mouthful it could not swallow; a coal-shed from whose door, hanging by one hinge, a blackened track led across the dying grass to a door standing open outwards from the structural excrescence which must be kitchen or scullery: these made the sordid complement of the hypocrisy ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... responsible task to determine what to retain and what to discard. This, to a large extent, must depend upon what part the ornament plays in the melody of the composition, whether it is really an integral part or an artificial excrescence. By all means never discard any embellishment which may serve to emphasize the melodic curve, or any one which may add to its declamatory character. A well-educated taste assisted by experience will be a fairly reliable guide in this matter. ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Doomsmen. Now and then some well-to-do proprietor may suffer loss from cattle thieving and rick burning, but as often as not the marauders pay full price for all they get. And this leads us to a consideration of the Doomsman himself, that foul excrescence upon our modern body politic. Fortunately, history here speaks clearly, and we have only ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... to us at last and motioned us to follow him. He led us to the rear of the chapel, where, plastered against the wall, was a semicircular excrescence,—a tiny cell, with a narrow door hewn from a single plank and fastened with a heavy padlock. Drawing forth a key from his belt he unlocked this and bade us enter. We did so, and he ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... abnormalities in the development of the embryon produce all degrees of deviation from the typical human form. Excessive development may result in an extra finger or toe, or in the production of some peculiar excrescence. Deficiency of development may produce all degrees of abnormality from the simple harelip to the most frightful deficiency, as the absence of a limb, or even of a head. It is in this manner that those unfortunate individuals known as hermaphrodites ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... studios may paint excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear: the eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of a girl of Palermo, who had little horns all over her body, like those of a young calf. In the Ashmolean museum at Oxford, a substance much resembling the horn of a goat is shown, which is said to have sprung from the forehead of a female named Mary Davis, whose likeness is there shown. The excrescence was most probably produced by a deranged secretion of the hair, and something of a similar nature may perhaps have befallen Genucius Cippus, which, of course, would be made the most of in those ages of superstition. Valerius Maximus, with all his credulity, does not say that they were ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... once came across the body of a child in the vicinity of a jungle village which had been unearthed by one. At Seonee we had, at one time, a plague of mad jackals, which did much damage. Sir Emerson Tennent writes of a curious horn or excrescence which grows on the head of the jackal occasionally, which is regarded by the Singhalese as a potent charm, by the instrumentality of which every wish can be realised, and stolen property will return of its ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... the accountable actions of this finely-knit and symmetrical form, especially the loftiest actions for which it was made, the diffusion of good, are exempted from this universal law? Such an exception, how incongruous! It would be an excrescence on the ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... arch, engaging, gay; Grant him the smoothest writer of his day; Lay stress upon the fact that he'd to seek In his own mind what others find in Greek; Grant all you please, in turn you must allow, Had fate postponed his life from then to now, He'd prune redundancies, apply the file To each excrescence that deforms his style, Oft in the pangs of labour scratch his head, And bite his nails, and bite them, till they bled. Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once nor twice but o'er and o'er again ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... a certain cure:—There is a God of Boils. If you have a boil you will plaster the offending excrescence without avail, if that be all you plaster; to get relief you must at the same time plaster the corresponding area on the image of the God. Go into his temple in Western China, and you will find this ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... flexible tail hanging a short distance beneath the bough. The dark reddish color of the hair of his skin, dashed with blackish tints, harmonized and blended well with the hue of the bark, so that at a distance, to an unpracticed eye, he appeared like a huge excrescence on the tree, or a large butt of a branch that had ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Paulinus, which Gundulf, or, according to another account, Lanfranc, transported from the older church. In this prolongation we seem to have a germ of those that gave us afterwards the Lady Chapels of Lichfield, Westminster, Gloucester, and elsewhere. This small excrescence, chapel it can scarcely be called, probably did not rise very high, as room had to be left above it for the east window, which, with the clerestory, was needed to light the presbytery. The latter, like the choir of the present cathedral and like that of St. Alban's, had ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... dishevelled hair, calls with terrific charms upon her three hundred Gods, upon Erebus, chaos, and the three-faced Hecate. She sprinkles around the waters of Avernus, and adds certain herbs that had been cropped by moonlight with a sickle of brass. She brings with her the excrescence which is found upon the forehead of a new-cast foal, of the size of a dried fig, and which unless first eaten by the mare, the mother never admits her young to the nourishment of her milk. After these preparations, Dido, with garments tucked up, and with one foot bare, approached the altars, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... trunk of the tree, for all the world like a tremendous wart. This was the burl, so prized for table-tops and panelling because of the fact that the twisted, wavy, helter-skelter grain lends to the wood an extraordinary beauty when polished. Bryee noted that the work of removing this excrescence had been accomplished very neatly. With a cross-cut saw the growth, perhaps ten feet in diameter, had been neatly sliced off much as a housewife cuts slice after slice from a loaf of bread. He guessed that these slices, practically circular in shape, ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... mounted her horse, the maiden's face expressed great anxiety, which increased as she alighted and entered the singular excrescence we have mentioned. A blazing pine-knot driven in the ground, shed a fierce, and flickering light over the interior of this gloomy abode, for it was an abode—and more, a home—the home of Bertha! The maniac was sitting upon a rude bench, close to the firebrand which gave a ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... seeks it discovers it. A less superb artist would have made it stick out in every line, so that the device would be a hindrance to the story-telling. As it is, nowhere in the more than nine thousand lines of Sigurd the Volsung is this alliteration an excrescence, but everywhere it is woven into the grand design of a fabric which is the richer ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... because of the great oriel window, which was a small room in itself, although it looked, as you approached the castle, no bigger than a swallow's nest on the face of the solid masonry, being the only excrescence visible above the trees from that point of view. The castle stood on a hill which descended precipitously from under the oriel, so that the latter almost overhung the valley in which the city lay below, and commanded a magnificent view ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... view that criminals are executed because they are above the level of the average. For the most part they are the excrescence of society, just as perverted, though in a different manner, as are those criminal types whom you consider below the level of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... umbrella-pine—grew close to the low parapets. Rose bushes gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be private was discovered. Only the north-west corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was a thick ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... aphorisms upon this unsafe topic, are Lord Alvanley's description of a man who "muddled away his fortune in paying his tradesmen's bills;" Lord Orford's definition of timber, "an excrescence on the face of the earth, placed there by Providence for the payment of debts;" and Pelham's argument, that it is respectable to be arrested, because it shows that the party once ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... representing the extremest divergences of one kind from another. Their names are the Carrier, the Pouter, the Fantail, and the Tumbler. In these large diagrams that I have here they are each represented in their relative sizes to each other. This first one is the Carrier; you will notice this large excrescence on its beak; it has a comparatively small head; there is a bare space round the eyes; it has a long neck, a very long beak, very strong legs, large feet, long wings, and so on. The second one is the Pouter, a very large bird, with very long legs and beak. It is called the Pouter ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... by the Ingenious Dr. Croon, as he received it from one Monsieur Verny, a French Apothecary at Montpelier; who having described the Grain of Kermes, to be an excrescence growing upon the Wood, and often upon the {363} leaves of a Shrub, plentifull in Languedock, and gather'd in the end of May, and the beginning of June, full of a red Juyce; subjoyns two Uses, which that Grain hath, the one for Medicine, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... Action-at-a-distance by one object upon another. Homeopathic magic: the principle that things which resemble one another will interact. For instance, there's an animal the natives call a shynph. It has an excrescence of horn on its brow like an arrowhead, and it arches its back like a bow when it jumps. Therefore, a shynph is equal to a bow and arrow, and for that reason the Kwanns made their bowstrings out of ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... tall and straight, without branches, and generally about thirty or forty feet high; at the top are twelve leaves, ten feet long, and half a foot broad; above the leaves, grows a large excrescence in the form of a cabbage, excellent to eat, but taking it off kills the tree. The cocoa is a species ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... myrtle-trees, which are the largest on the island, and supplied us with all the timber we used; yet even these would not work to a greater length than forty feet. The top of the myrtle is circular, and as uniform and regular as if clipped round by art. It bears an excrescence like moss on its bark, having the taste and smell of garlic, and was used instead of it by our people. We found here the pimento, and the cabbage-tree, but in no great quantity. Besides these, there were a great number of plants of various kinds, which we were not botanists enough to describe ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... replaced others) than their neighbours, which are obliterated to the extent of being lions or lionesses only by guesswork. These nameless feline creatures hold what appear to be portions of sheep, one of them having at its flank a curious excrescence like the stinging scorpion of the Mithra groups. The griffins, on the other hand, although every detail is rubbed out, are splendid in power and expression—great lion-bodied creatures, with gigantic eagle's beak, manifestly birds rather ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... from a Foal's Forehead (Vol. viii., p. 292.).—Your correspondent H. P. will find the love charm, consisting of a fig-shaped excrescence on a foal's forehead, and called Hippomanes, alluded to by Juvenal, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... because very often the flowers appear before the leaves, has a peculiar Japanese grace on that account. Every farmer's boy's mouth waters at sight of the cool, juicy May-apple, the extraordinary pulpy growth on this plant and the swamp pink. This excrescence seems to have no other use than that of a gratuitous, harmless gift to the thirsty child, from whom it exacts no reward of carrying seeds to plant distant colonies, as the mandrake's yellow, tomato-like ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan |
