"Spinal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Charles etienne (1503-1564) made one of the first noteworthy discoveries, pointing out for the first time that the spinal cord contains a canal, continuous throughout its length. He also made other minor discoveries of some importance, but his researches were completely overshadowed and obscured by the work of a young ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... proceeded. It was now afternoon; and, when a signal was given above, that all was clear, the five Thugs who sat opposite the travellers sprang in upon them, and, with the aid of others, strangled them. Having done this, they broke their spinal bones, and then threw them out of a hole made at the side, into the river, and kept on their course; the boat being all this time pulled along by the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... From the darkness of the yard beside the house there came a grievous howl, distressful to the spinal marrow, a sound of animal pain. It was repeated even more passionately, and another voice was also heard, one both hoarsely bass and falsetto in the articulation of a single syllable. "Ouch!" There were sounds of violent scuffing, and the bass-falsetto voice cried: ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... He is perfectly insensible, and in all probability he will suffer from the concussion to the brain, and spinal injury be ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... between the gleaming orbs he pressed the trigger. It takes a well-aimed weapon to kill a royal Bengal tiger, even at a short distance, but Jack's rifle was well aimed. The tiny sphere of lead darted through the brain and along the spinal marrow as if fired with the vicious energy ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... of wintergreen 1/2 oz., and gum of camphor 1/2 oz. Let it all be well incorporated and you have the most excellent pain killer that was ever made. It is good for rheumatism, headache, neuralgia, cuts, sprains, burns, bruises, spinal affections, ear-ache, tooth-ache, sore throat, &c. This is used internally and externally, the dose internally is 10 drops; ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... is used to express not only the medullary part of the brain, spinal marrow, nerves, organs of sense and muscles, but also at the same time that living principle, or spirit of animation, which resides throughout the body, without being cognizable to our ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... cases of all other communicable diseases. This horrible sapping of the physical energies of the nation, with the devastating results in the family, with the poisoning of the germs for the next generation, and with the disastrous diseases of brain and spinal cord, is surely the gravest material danger which exists. How small compared with that the thousands of deaths from crime and accidents and wrecks! how insignificant the harvest of human life which any war ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... too weak to contend with his horrible offspring. My interest in the man was at once awakened. He told me that he was from the Lot-et-Garonne, where he owned land, and had been a tobacco-planter, until a disease of the spinal marrow compelled him to seek an occupation that required less exertion. Thus he came to be an innkeeper. He had spent much money upon doctors, who had done him little or no good. The only treatment that had given him ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... that it is just as possible to have impaired and unhealthy conditions in any part of the brain as to have them in the stomach, liver, lungs, or spinal cord. Physical diseases are contagious and so are moral. It is generally impossible to preserve the moral organs and faculties of a youth in healthy condition who is allowed to associate habitually with the depraved; and it is very difficult indeed for ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... a painful and wearying form of nerve trouble which mostly affects the arms and legs. It can, however, originate in any other part of the body through the spinal nerve centres. It may sometimes be due to injury, but the usual cause is some form of thickening or misplacement of the spinal structures, which induces pressure upon the nerves as they emerge through the apertures between the spinal bones. A careful examination ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... fall off a chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on my back for a time. I fretted over it at first, but when I got about again, I found that I was a man maimed for life. I don't know what the injury was—some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or brain, I believe—some flaw about the size of a pin's head—the doctors have never made out. But every time that I plunged into work, I broke down; for a long time I thought I should struggle through; but at last I became aware that I was on the shelf, with other cracked ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to have the back of one's shirt or coat slightly padded with cotton and quilted. The heat prevents one wearing thick clothes, and there is no doubt that the action of the direct rays of the burning sun all down the back on the spinal cord, is very injurious, and may be a fruitful cause of sunstroke. It is certainly productive of great lassitude and weariness. I used to wear a thin quilted sort of shield made of cotton-drill, which fastened round ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... Inspector Mac or the excellent local practitioner has grasped the overwhelming importance of this incident. One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell! Picture to yourself the unilateral development, the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... battered. He would listen to no arguments. The desire to get to the mouth of the cavern, and kill Leith before the morning, had produced an insanity, and we crawled and climbed along the face of those basalt cliffs in a manner that chilled my spinal marrow. Holman possessed the courage of a maniac. His imagination was blinded to the dangers that lay alongside the crumbling shelves of rock, and I scrambled behind him wondering dimly what would happen to Edith and her sister if an unkind fate flung us ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... they left the hall, and urging them to return, and she beamed on the mother and child, and later, visited their home. A typical home of millions of working people, but true love reigned there, and made it a more pleasant place than many a mansion. The mother had spinal disease and her child seemed to have been born only to die. Doctor and friends had striven in vain to unlock the bands of mother love, and let the little suffering life escape, but the mother refused. If love and ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range, should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain, which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one, comes first—it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it—it is the brain of the reptile; then came the brain averaging as three to one—it is that of the bird. Next in succession ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... off the pressure of the head and shoulders from the spine, but at the same time the inferior parts of the body contribute to draw the spine straight by their weight; or lastly, recourse may be had to a spinal machine first described in the Memoires of the academy of surgery in Paris, Vol. III. p. 600, by M. Le Vacher, and since made by Mr. Jones, at N^o 6, North-street, Tottenham-court Road, London, which suspends the head, and places the weight of it on the hips. This machine is capable of improvement ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of Europe, where he lived the greater part of his life. The assault on Sumner strengthened the Republican party, and secured his re-election to the Senate; but it produced nervous irritation of the brain and spinal cord, a disorder which can only be cured under favorable conditions, and even then is likely to return if the patient is exposed to a severe mental strain. Sumner's cure by Dr. Brown-Sequard was considered a remarkable one, and has a place in the ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... judgment would be anticipatory of that great event, if, indeed, it would not render it needless. As to the resurrection, some believe it to be merely spiritual, others corporeal; the latter asserting that the os coccygis, or last bone of the spinal column, will serve, as it were, as a germ, and that, vivified by a rain of forty days, the body will sprout from it. Among the signs of the approaching resurrection will be the rising of the sun in the West. It will be ushered in by three blasts of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... belief that none of them were hopeless. Experience has taught me that there is a point beyond which any constitution—especially one so abnormally sensitive as the opium-eater's—can not endure keen physical suffering without death from spinal exhaustion. I once heard the eminent Dr. Stevens say that he made it a rule never to attempt a surgical operation if it must consume more than an hour. Similarly, I have come to the conclusion never to amputate a man from his opium-self if the agony must last longer ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... to be the seeing home of Schneider. It would have come more naturally to Follet, who also lived at Dubois's, but Follet was fairly snarling at Schneider. French Eva's name had been mentioned. On my word, as I saw Follet curving his spinal column, and Schneider lighting up his face with his perfect teeth, I thought with an immense admiration of the unpolished and loose-hung Stires amid the eternal smell of tar and dust. It was a mere discussion of her hair, incoherent and pointless enough. No scandal, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... except when he goes round his wards, his patients may never know, of his existence. They go to sleep in a quiet anteroom, and they waken up in the ward. Of the operation and all its difficulties they know no more than their friends at home. Perhaps even more wonderful is the newer method of spinal anaesthesia, which we used largely for the difficult abdominal cases. With the injection of a minute quantity of fluid into the spine all sensation disappears up to the level of the arms, and, provided he cannot see what is going on, any ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... legs, limbs, though not at the present time with any legal penalty for not doing so; it prescribes the word stomach for polite usage in describing that part of the body which lies subjacent to the actual stomach, anterior to the spinal column and posterior to the abdominal wall; it forbids a visible bifurcated garment for the "limbs" of a female; and it does a variety of other absurd things, all going to show that in some singular fashion it has confounded acts with things; as one might call all knives immoral ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... house, and brave The March rain and the winds that rave. ... O, landscape I am one who stands Returned with pale and broken hands Glad for the day that I have known, And finds the deserted doorway strown With shoulder blade and spinal bone. And you who nourished me and bred I find the spirit from you fled. You gave me dreams,'twas at your breast My soul's beginning rose and pressed My steps afar at last and shaped A world elusive, which escaped Whatever love or thought could find Beyond the tireless wings ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... may be a small enough gift, and one quickly withdrawn. I say only that you have no escape from us. We have your name, and the true symbol is the thing, as you should know. We also have cuttings from your hair and your beard; we have the parings of your nails, five cubic centimeters of your spinal fluid and a scraping from your liver. We have your body through those, nor can you take it out of our reach. Your name gives us your soul." He looked at Hanson piercingly. "Shall I tell you what it would be like for your soul to live ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... "Quaternary man is always man in every acceptation of the word. In every case in which the bones collected have enabled us to judge, he has ever been found to have the hand and foot proper to our species, and that double curvature of the spinal column has been made out, so characteristic that Serres made it the distinctive attribute of his human kingdom. In every case with him, as with us, the skull is more fully developed than the face. In the Neanderthal skull so often quoted as bestial, the cranial capacity ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... are able to do damage which billions could not earlier in the disease. The man in whom the few remaining germs are confined largely to the skin is fortunate. The unfortunates are those who, with the spirochetes in their artery walls, heart muscle, brain, and spinal cord, develop the destructive arterial and nervous changes which lead to the crippling of life at its root ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... in hand: I dont mind. I feel perfectly convinced that this is not a moral case at all: it's a physical one. Theres something abnormal about his brain. That means, probably, some morbid condition affecting the spinal cord. And that means the circulation. In short, it's clear to me that he's suffering from an obscure form of blood-poisoning, which is almost certainly due to an accumulation of ptomaines in the nuciform sac. I'll remove ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... become famous, and deservedly so, although they were sometimes false in proportion and disposed in attitudes quite impossible in nature. He illustrated this by a fine plaster cast of the Venus of Milo, before which we were standing. He showed that the spinal cord in the neck could never, from the position of the head, have joined that of the body, that there was a radical fault in the termination of the spinal column, and that the navel was located falsely with respect to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... if it was nothing more. They knew the crushing force of Grant's numbers, but the danger was tangible and they could see a possible issue out of it, through blood and sacrifice. But they knew and felt that Atlanta was the back door to Richmond. Let the enemy once enter that and divide the spinal column of the Confederacy, and what hope was there! For a brief space the maimed and dying body might writhe with final strength; the quivering arms strike fierce, spasmodic blows; but no nourishment could come—the end must be death—and ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... body is constructed, let us imagine its division into perfectly equal parts, one the right and the other the left, by a great knife severing it through the median, or middle line in front, backward through the spinal column, as a butcher divides an ox or a sheep into halves for the market. In a section of the body thus planned the skull and the spine together are shown to have formed a tube, containing the brain and spinal cord. The other parts of the body form a second tube (ventral) in front of the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... home, where the parents toiled all day for worse than naught, just to satisfy their unhealthy cravings, while the children grew up riotous, half starved, and full of inherited vices. There was a little child I saw once, a cripple, dying slowly of some sad spinal disease, lying in a dark corner, on what seemed to me a heap of rags. Oh, God, I can see that child's face now! I remember when we heard of its death my mother burst into tears. They were tears of joy, she told me afterwards, that another suffering child's life was ended; 'and there are ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Gasserian ganglion, whence it passes by a commissure to an agglomeration of globules in the medulla oblongata or in the protuberance; from this point, by a series of numerous reflex and complicated acts, it is transformed by the mediation of the spinal cord into a centrifugal excitation which radiates outward by means of the spinal ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... in the family, besides Martha Spriggs, the funny old girl. My princess, and her two stepbrothers, Stephen and Lemuel, and Polly, who has been a sufferer from spinal ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... "Spinal meningitis," they said laconically, and they were taking him down to the hospital. I took a look and saw in that mask of terror and agony the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... 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 ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... called the spinal cord, lies safely in a bony case made by the spine, and many nerves branch ...
— Child's Health Primer For Primary Classes • Jane Andrews
... left school was spent in the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, but the development of the spinal difficulty which had shadowed me from childhood forced me into Dr. Weir Mitchell's hospital for the late spring, and the next winter I was literally bound to a bed in my sister's house for six months. In spite of its tedium, the long winter ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... development she tries an experiment once exceedingly thorough, and then the question is solved for all time. For she always takes time enough to try the experiment exhaustively. It took ages to find how to build a spinal column or brain, but when the experiment was finished she had reason to be, and was, satisfied. And if this is true of bodily organs we should expect that the same law would hold good when the animal development gradually passes over into the spiritual. And what is human ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... much applause as the other, which shows that an operatic audience will not only tolerate, but even applaud a singer who substitutes physical attractions, temperament and a peculiar wriggle of the spinal column for beautiful ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... burnt relicks lie not in fear of worms, or to be an heritage for serpents. In carnal sepulture, corruptions seem peculiar unto parts; and some speak of snakes out of the spinal marrow. But while we suppose common worms in graves, 'tis not easy to find any there; few in churchyards above a foot deep, fewer or none in churches though in fresh-decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair, give the ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... sought in the confused and arid expositions of official 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
... She had been an invalid, she said, for fifteen years, and while I do not recollect precisely her afflictions, it appears to me that she had had chronic trichnia spiralis for that length of time, with intermittent cerebro spinal meningitis tending towards hydrophobia. This imposing patient cowed the whole invalid circle. But one man showed the slightest resistance, and that was old man Smith, who had been very proud of his chronic liver complaint. He told me in confidence the next day that he believed "the whole story ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... delicate-looking young woman, plain and poor, a widow evidently from the style of her shabby mourning and sad expression of face, bearing in her arms a weird and sickly-looking child, evidently a sufferer from spinal disease—an infant as to size, but preternaturally old ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... for lack of assimilative power. The back, especially on either side of the spine, is rubbed with gentle pressure and hot olive oil. This pressure is so applied that a genial heat arises along the whole spinal column. This done twice a day, for half-an-hour at a time, and continued for several weeks, will markedly restore assimilative power. Cases which have been perfectly helpless for eight and even ten years are cured by this simple method, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... which had slain the cayman was a chance—a sort of miracle. When the Indian struck with his mace upon the but-end of the pole, the iron pierced through the nape, into the vertebral column, and penetrated the spinal marrow, the ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... disclosing the secret. From out of that basket came a small bear. I swallowed an ejaculation and looked at him. He, entirely unabashed, returned my gaze—a funny little ruffian! On the end of his spinal column he teetered, all four feet in the air, the cock of his head irresistibly suggesting the tilt of a gamin's cap. His tongue hung waggishly out of his mouth, and a sort of loose, dissipated, tough, cynical humour pervaded his person, from the squint of ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the man complained seemed to encircle his waist, wherefore the strange physician, having untied his patient's arms from behind, and retied them in front, began his measurements again, this time from the spinal column. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... him: "There appears, indeed, to be a limit given to the adaptability of every organism by the type of its tribe or phylum. Thus, for example, no vertebrate animal can acquire the ventral nerve chord of articulate animals instead of the characteristic spinal marrow of the vertebrate animals."—History of Creation, vol. 1, p. 250. So the vertebrate must forever remain a vertebrate, and the articulate forever an articulate. Were they both evolved from the same unit? We are anxious to know, how from a pulpy mass of flesh, from a moneron, a creature ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... used for pething (pithing) cattle; that is, killing them by piercing the spinal cord (pith, or ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... with the pitching and vibration of the vessel, felt not like a spinal column, but like a loose string of beads. If by swallowing the sword I could have acquired stamina, I should have tried it; but I did not think I could keep it down. At length, with a pasty face, blear-eyes, liver-coloured lips, a ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... you!" when the fatal bullet unhappily smote the hero; and, having entered near the top of his left shoulder, penetrated through his lungs, carrying with it part of the adhering epaulette, and lodged in the spinal marrow of his back. A shout of horrid joy, from the enemy, seemed to announce their sense of the cruel success. His lordship was prevented from falling, by Captain Hardy; to whom he said, with a smile—"They have done for ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... and useful is the Santa Claus Home at Highgate, which the two Misses CHARLES have been administering with such devotion and success since 1891. Its modest aim is to keep open twenty beds for small children suffering from hip and spinal disease, and to give them such treatment as will prevent them becoming hopeless cripples; and this purpose hitherto has been fulfilled no one can say exactly how, but with help not only from known friends but mysteriously from the ravens. To-day, however, the high ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... relaxing when it is diminished. But unlike other organs of the body, the brain is densely packed in an unyielding cavity, and there must be room made for this increased volume of circulation whenever it takes place. This is accomplished, physiologists tell us, in the cerebro-spinal fluid, the quantity of which has been estimated at two ounces. This fluid is readily absorbed and as readily reproduced, and thus its quantity varies in a certain inverse proportion to the volume of the circulation of blood ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... to the splendour of their opening verses. The Garden of Proserpine is one of the few that keep the good wine for the last. Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautiful passages rather than beauty informing the whole poem. Swinburne's poems have no spinal cord. One feels this even in that most beautiful of his lyrics, the first chorus in Atalanta in Calydon. But how many poets are there who could have sustained for long the miracle of "When the hounds of spring are on winter traces," and the verse that follows? Mrs. Disney Leith tells us in ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... claimed my car under the Oath of AEsculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses—magnates at the ends ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... subsequent attack. Pasteur, in his researches on the subject of rabies, developed this power of resistance by inoculating into rabbits the rabies infection of a monkey. Monkey rabies is not a severe form and is scarcely felt by the ordinary rabbit, but if the infective material (usually part of the spinal cord) of the monkey-infected rabbit is transferred to a second rabbit, the disease becomes more severe; and if the disease is passed from animal to animal, it may be built up into as severe a form as desired, up to the maximum. Pasteur found that by inoculating an individual with a one-day rabbit, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... the nature of a hormone is generally agreed, and may be regarded as having been proved in 1874 when Goltz and Ewald [Footnote: Pfluegers Archiv, ix., 1874.] removed the whole of the lumbo-sacral portion of the spinal cord of a bitch and found that the mammae in the animal developed and enlarged in the usual way during pregnancy and secreted milk normally after parturition. Ribbert [Footnote: Fortschritte der Medicin, Bd. 7.] in 1898 transplanted ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... "we have two cases of congenital hip disease and three of spinal tuberculosis—that is one of them in the second crib." Her eyes moved on from Sandy to Rosita. "And the fifth patient has such a dreadful case of rheumatism. Sad, isn't it, in so young a child? Yes, the Senior Surgeon says it ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... technical term for nervousness is psycho-neurosis—disease of the psyche. There are certain "real neuroses" such as paralysis and spinal-cord disease, which involve an organic impairment of nerve-tissue. However, as this book deals only with psychic disturbance, we shall, throughout, use the term neuroses and psycho-neuroses indiscriminately, to ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... even in summer, half a foot deep upon the ground. The "fox-fire," rotting logs glowing with a faint luminosity, startled her several times, and the hooting-owl's shuddering bass—hoo! hoo! hoo-oo-ah-h! (like the awful keys of the organ which "touch the spinal cord of the universe")—sent all her blood to her heart. Under ordinary circumstances, she surely would not have started at the rustling made by the timid hare in the thicket near by. There was ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... Pasteur began to investigate hydrophobia, and at length discovered the bacilli which produce it. At least he found in animals affected with rabies, notably in the spinal marrow of such animals, minute living organisms, having the form of thread-like animalculae, with heads at one end. The microscope showed also among these thread-like bodies other organisms that were like small circular black ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... a mass of nervous substance which is found located in the human brain in a position near the middle of the skull, almost directly above the extreme top of the spinal column. It is shaped like a small cone, and is of a reddish-gray color. It lies in front of the cerebellum, and is attached to the third ventricle of the brain. It contains a small quantity of peculiar particles of a gritty, sand-like substance, which is commonly known ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... satisfactory theory of inhibition has given rise, in recent years, to a good deal of discussion. Ever since it was discovered that the reflexes of the spinal cord are normally modified or restrained by the activity of the brain and Setschenow (1863) attempted to prove the existence of localized inhibition centers, the need of such a theory has been felt. The discussion, however, has been mainly physiological, and we cannot ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Randalls settle. Harry 'phoned me early this morning and wanted to know if I didn't desire to be useful; said he would exchange compliments sometime." A significant pause, then a reminiscent sigh. "Every vertebra in my spinal column aches with ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... admitted truth that the histological changes in disease follow in an inverse order the developmental processes taking place in the embryo. Hence the recent physiological division of the nervous system by Dr. Hughlings Jackson into highest, middle, and lowest centers, and the evolution of the cerebro-spinal functions from the most automatic to the least automatic, from the most simple to the most complex, from the most organized to the least organized. In the recognition of this division we have the promise of a steadier and more scientific ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... doubt if it can last, with all the exertions which are making to make it worse. She will not give up her family, and he will not associate with them.—The Duke of Sussex is seriously ill. I don't know his complaint, but I hear something spinal. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... cerebellum, delivered to certain motor nerves by way of the spinal cord, disposed him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... that the condition of madame presents any serious symptoms; but this constant drowsiness, this general listlessness, and her natural tendency to a spinal affection demand great care. Her lymph is inspissated. She wants a change of air. She ought to be sent either to the waters of Bareges or to the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... that struck the battle-field, and when those four currents of wind met, the bones began to rattle; and the foot came to the ankle, and the hand came to the wrist, and the jaws clashed together, and the spinal column gathered up the ganglions and the nervous fiber, and all the valley wriggled and writhed, and throbbed, and rocked, and rose up. There, a man coming to life. There, a hundred men. There, a thousand; and all falling ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... intelligent we are, and how dangerous; and we mustn't let him know! I think he believes we are much like his present slaves: he gets away with murder with them. You've noticed the lumps on the back of your necks? Well, they have them, too; it's something that's attached to the spinal cord and gives him telepathic control over them; also the power to hurt them dreadfully—as you've unfortunately found out. His slaves don't understand these lumps; they don't seem to know that he would lose control if they could only in some way get rid ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... of Empire fly beyond the mountain bars, Till, glittering o'er the Western wave, they joined the setting stars; And ocean trodden into paths that trampling giants ford, To find the planet's vertebrae and sink its spinal cord. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more neither the man nor the woman gave a sign of having heard him. The spring-cart's oscillatory motion seemed to have entered into their spinal joints; and now that they had come to a halt, their heads continued to wag forward and back as they contemplated the haze of smoke spread, like a blue scarf over the town, and the one long slate roof ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... another, and then was heard, above the shouting of excited Hottentots, the shrill screaming of wounded and enraged elephants. Jerry heard the tremendous sounds for the first time, and quaked in his spinal marrow. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... hospital orderly, Sergeant Gidel, who was nearing his end, and whose cruel hiccough we had been unable to alleviate for a week past. This man knew his business, he knew the meaning of probe, of fever, of hardened abdomen. He knew too that he had a bullet in the spinal cord. He never asked us for anything, and as we dared not tell him lies, we were overcome by a kind of shame in his presence. He stayed barely two days in the room, looking with dim eyes at the engravings on the walls, and the Empire bureau ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... shrugged his shoulders. "All the first matter should be removed except for the spinal chord and the vertebrae. You'd still ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... structure of the nervous system in his study of physiology, a brief description will suffice for the present purpose. The nervous system consists of two parts, (1) the central part, or cerebro-spinal centre, and (2) an outer part—the spinal nerves. The central part, or cerebro-spinal centre, includes the spinal cord, passing upward through the vertebrae of the spinal column and the brain. The brain consists of three parts: The cerebrum, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the pliant elbow strung; He dropp'd his arm, an unassisting weight, And stood all impotent, expecting fate: Full on his neck the falling falchion sped, From his broad shoulders hew'd his crested head: Forth from the bone the spinal marrow flies, And, sunk in dust, the corpse extended lies. Rhigmas, whose race from fruitful Thracia came, (The son of Pierus, an illustrious name,) Succeeds to fate: the spear his belly rends; Prone from his car the thundering chief descends. The squire, who saw expiring on the ground His prostrate ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... stopping—but when it came to starting again—well, you just ought to have seen how that piebald acted! He simply laughed at the idea, his laugh extending in ecstatic chuckles all the way down his spinal column till the very carriage shook with his mirth. Then he planted his two fore feet down hard as much as to say, "I challenge you to budge me one inch from this spot," and though the Filipino threatened, entreated, implored, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... immediately to the cold menace of the gun-muzzle pressing against the top of his spinal column. He straightened sullenly. Racey, transferring the gun-muzzle to the small of McFluke's back, stooped swiftly, drew out McFluke's knife and tossed ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... is found in its ability to enhance and perpetuate the effects of soluble remedies (introduced hypodermically, by the mouth, or otherwise) upon the internal organs, and more especially upon the cerebro-spinal axis. Some chemical affinity between the remedy employed and the protoplasm of the nerve cell is, of course, assumed to exist; and it is with the enhancement of this affinity—this bond of union between the medicinal solution and the nervous element—that we shall chiefly concern ourselves ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... believe this to be true. It has also been asserted that the stripe on each shoulder is sometimes double. The shoulder-stripe is certainly very variable in length and outline. A white ass, but not an albino, has been described without either spinal or shoulder stripe; and these stripes are sometimes very obscure, or actually quite lost, in dark-coloured asses. The koulan of Pallas is said to have been seen with a double shoulder-stripe. The hemionus has no ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... larder, he is "starving," and you may be "starving" many moons without dying or thinking of dying. "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and "sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of the spinal column ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... no' mo' cookin' in his house, nor darnin' of socks, nor patchin' of britches untel dere is some female votin', why dat day de ballot will be fetched home to women on a silver platter. All dat stands between women an' suffrage is de lack of a spinal colum. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... ever complained of to me; and when, after she had gone upstairs, Miss Randall said, "Maybe Sally ought to see the doctor," I had a sudden awful, empty, gulpy feeling. Suppose she was going to be really sick! Suppose she was going to have pneumonia or scarlet-fever or spinal meningitis! Here we were, cut off from medical assistance till Wednesday morning. And it was our own fault—mine; mine, for being too funny. Then I thought, "Maybe those men on the float are losing all the money they've got in the world," and that made me feel pretty glum; and then ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... up a minute later with their men; then we all cautiously approached the still form upon the ground. The creature was quite dead, and an examination resulted in disclosing the fact that Whitely's bullet had pierced its heart, and mine had severed the spinal cord. ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... wear one uniform, which will consist of white satin slippers, pantalons of cashmere, with feather pillows worn as a protection strapped over the knees, a bolster being wound round the body to safeguard the chest, ribs, and spinal column. A broad gay, coloured satin sash with a cocked hat and ostrich feathers completes the costume. The last to indicate, owing to the risks and dangers in which the combatants may be involved, its association with le vrai champs de bataille, to which, but for the "new provisions" it would bear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... that they feel this because 'it looks as if they had no control over themselves.' When they feel that there is no need for control, they no longer feel fear, and the relaxor effect has a wider field of operation, producing a general rosiness, erection of spinal sexual organs, etc. Such a blush would thus be a partial sexual equivalent, and allow of the inhibition of other sexual effects, through the warning it gives, and the fear aroused, as well as being in itself a slight outlet of relaxor energy. When the relationships ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... nervous system which would naturally be supposed to have to do with such functional peculiarities as the dancer exhibits. So far as I have been able to learn, no investigator has carefully examined the brain and spinal cord in comparison with those of the common mouse, and only those who have failed to find any structural basis for the facts of behavior in the organs of the ear have attempted to account for the dancer's whirling and deafness by assuming that the cerebellum is unusual in structure. ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... a scene of bright peaceful felicity, which seemed to permeate Nigel's frame right inward to the spinal marrow, and would have kept him entranced there at his work for several hours longer if the cravings of a healthy appetite had not ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. This hammer was operated by a lever or tongue at the head of the handle, the connection between the hammer at the distal end and the lever at the proximal end being effected by means of a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal side of the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a jaw of sharp teeth to take hold of the carpet. The thing could not talk; but it could do almost anything else, so fearfully and wonderfully was ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... mines my health utterly broke down. One day I fell fainting under the lash of the brutal overseer, and as I lay on the ground he ran at me and kicked me twice with his heavy iron-shod boots, once on the hip, breaking the bone, and once on the lower part of the spine, crushing the spinal cord, and paralysing my lower limbs ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... later, the squire's corpse was thrown over the castle walls. "'Tis a shame," growled the captain; "he would have made so fine a mute. One of the torturers' knives must ha' slipped, whilst they were cutting out his tongue. For I noticed that the spinal cord was severed at the base of the mouth—and that is ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... the blood eagle. This was a monstrous practice by which the Northmen sometimes wreaked vengeance upon their fallen enemies. The ribs were severed from the spinal column and bent outward in the form of wings and salt poured into the wounds, whereupon ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... to caution him not to tell my wife. Poor Mathilde! I have been unconscionably long a-dying. And now he turns round again and bids me order my coffin. But I fear, despite his latest bulletin, I shall go on some time yet increasing my knowledge of spinal disease. I read all the books about it, as well as experiment practically. What clinical lectures I will give in heaven, demonstrating the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... assuredly did not, for little chills began to play up and down my spinal column, and I wasn't exactly in love with the idea of having an escaped murderer crawling out of a hay-stack at midnight and cutting my throat. The ranchman McMein had been killed on Saturday, and the cowboy had been kept on the run ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... apart from the common dignity of manhood, Commodores, in general possess no real dignity at all. True, it is expedient for crowned heads, generalissimos, Lord-high-admirals, and Commodores, to carry themselves straight, and beware of the spinal complaint; but it is not the less veritable, that it is a piece of assumption, exceedingly uncomfortable to themselves, and ridiculous to ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them - of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by QUATRE VINGT TREIZE for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... i.e., the shoulder blades should almost touch one another. CHEST—Deep and somewhat narrow. It must be capacious, but the capacity must be got from depth, and not from "barrel" ribs—a bad fault in a running hound. BACK—Rather bony, and free from any cavity in the spinal column, the arch in the back being more marked in the dog than in the bitch. LOINS—Broad and very powerful, showing plenty of muscular development. THIGHS—Long and well developed, with good second thigh. The muscle in the ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... the World," a gift from the artist himself, who formerly lived in a house on this site and in it painted the original. The ages at which patients are received are between three and ten, and the cases are frequently paralysis, spinal ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... development, is, at one early period, only "a simple fold of nervous matter, with difficulty distinguishable into three parts, while a little tail-like prolongation towards the hinder parts, and which had been the first to appear, is the only representation of a spinal marrow. Now, in this state it perfectly resembles the brain of an adult fish, thus assuming in transitu the form that in the fish is permanent. In a short time, however, the structure is become more complex, the parts more ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... 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 direct touch with the only thing that concerns him, namely, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... beautiful boy about ten, the son of an English lord. His father was with him. He had been bitten in the face, and was taking the treatment. I said to Pasteur, 'Will he live?' 'No,' said he, 'the boy will be dead in six days. He was bitten too near the top of the spinal column, and ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... with the effect of immersing his spinal column in the depths of the arm-chair he selected. He crossed his legs, and swung one foot to and fro in its high wrinkled ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Soon the cells along the middle line of this small sheet become rearranged to make an obvious streak or band, and about this line a simple tube is constructed which is destined to become the future brain and spinal cord. The whole disk continues to enlarge by further division of its constituent elements so that it encloses more and more of the yolk mass, but the little chick itself is made out of the cells along the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... less distinguished characters) has "a gray tissue." This does not refer to his coat, but to something inside of him which renders him the nervous creature that he is. Well, not to make too scientific a matter of it, it appears that our "gray tissue" operates upon our "spinal cord," and raises the old boy (if we may be allowed the expression) with our brains; and this, in some way, but really we do not exactly see how, produces the raps, and leads us to suppose that we are hearing (dear old lady!) from our grandmother. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... expand like the gas in a bottle of soda-water when the cork is drawn, and the bubbles interfere with the circulation of the blood in the finer blood-vessels (of especial importance being those of the brain and spinal cord), and the serious illness and the death of workmen has frequently resulted from this cause. Accordingly, the men who work in such "compressed atmospheres" are now made to pass slowly through a series of ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... journal of each succeeding day. The committee came day after day and studied me. They induced me to lay aside part of my clothing that they might examine me more minutely, especially about the joints of the ankle, the knee, shoulder, and elbow; and were never weary of examining my neck and spinal column. I could not talk to them, and they had never seen a vertebrate higher in organization than their frogs and toads; wherefore, at the end of four weeks, they reported "that I was a new and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... spreading out across his shoulders. Like a woman's hair, he thought. Perhaps it was a bit coarser. But not much. But then, just as the strange soothing feeling was putting him back to sleep, the hairs changed their soft caress and a dozen of them plunged into his spinal cord and upward into that small old-brain where all the bogies of the stone age ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... it were out of the walls of the stomach, there are, in our wonderful human machine, great bunches of nerves, called, by the medicals, the 'great ganglionic system,' and he will observe that these nerves are in intimate and inseparable connection with the spinal cord, and the brain. Then, if he recollects that a perpetual series of conversations and signals goes on by those agents between the stomach and the brain—that, in fact, the two are talking together every ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... impression it has received. What has been said about the different nervous centres of the body demonstrates the existence of a memory in the nerve cells diffused through the heart and intestines; in those of the spinal cord, in the cells of the motor ganglia, and in the cells of the cortical substance of the ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... for Mrs. Carbury, and with instructions to ask if she was well enough to receive Lord and Lady Montbarry and Miss Lockwood on the morrow. In a week's time, the two households were on the friendliest terms. Mrs. Carbury, confined to the sofa by a spinal malady, had been hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... was admirable to see with what dexterity St. Jago dodged behind the beast, till at last he contrived to give the fatal touch to the main tendon of the hind leg after which, without much difficulty, he drove his knife into the head of the spinal marrow, and the cow dropped as if struck by lightning. He cut off pieces of flesh with the skin to it, but without any bones, sufficient for our expedition. We then rode on to our sleeping-place, and had for supper "carne con cuero," ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... high pulleys are most used for correcting high, round shoulders; low pulleys for low, round shoulders; side pulleys for individual high or low shoulders, and giant pulleys for the development of the walls of the chest and to correct spinal curvature. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... supreme. His head is flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull, pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger, there in the slender loins. That is the node, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... pertaining to each faculty of the mind. The size of each organ is estimated, not by feeling for bumps or depressions, but by measuring the length of the fibres of the brain from their common center in the medulla oblongata, at the head of the spinal column, and at a point equi-distant from the ears in the interior of the head. From this common centre the fibres of the brain range horizontally and upward in all directions like the branches of a tree. Development of brain fibre laterally gives a wide head, longitudinally, from the ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... ague-breeding swamps of Arkansas was powerless against the mukunguru of East Africa. The premonitory symptoms of the African type were felt in my system at 10 A.M. First, general lassitude prevailed, with a disposition to drowsiness; secondly, came the spinal ache which, commencing from the loins, ascended the vertebrae, and extended around the ribs, until it reached the shoulders, where it settled into a weary pain; thirdly came a chilliness over the whole body, which was quickly followed ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Division have now had the experience which many had longed for. Going 'over the top' was not quite so romantic as fancy had pictured it to be, and the experience which is common to all who take part in it for the first time defies expression. A peculiar sensation creeps annoyingly slowly along the spinal column, subtly affecting every member of the body. There's a gripping of the heart and a numbing of the brain, and the tongue persistently cleaves to the roof of the mouth, which seems as dry as powdered chalk. A choking sensation accompanies every effort to cough. You may be in ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... with a little brain they have a very thick spine and nerves. But gait and movement of the arms are for the most part functions of the brain; because the limbs receive their motion, and even the slightest modification of it, from the brain through the medium of the spinal nerves; and this is precisely why voluntary movements tire us. This feeling of fatigue, like that of pain, has its seat in the brain, and not as we suppose in the limbs, hence motion promotes sleep; on the other hand, those ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... took advantage of a moment when she was breathing to enter her mouth in the form of a ray of light. She was enceinte for twelve years, at the end of which period the fruit of her womb came out through her spinal column. From its first moment the child could walk and speak, and its body was surrounded by a five-coloured cloud. The newly-born took the name of Yuean-shih T'ien-wang, and his mother was generally known as T'ai-yuean Sheng-mu, 'the Holy Mother ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... and others. And the outcome of ten years of varied diagnosis and treatment was that the doctors had now abandoned her. Some thought her illness to be due to the rupture of certain ligaments, others believed in the presence of a tumour, others again to paralysis due to injury to the spinal cord, and as she, with maidenly revolt, refused to undergo any examination, and they did not even dare to address precise questions to her, they each contented themselves with their several opinions and declared that she was beyond cure. Moreover, she now solely ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... for instance, 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 ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... colours often have a spinal band or stripe of different and darker tint than the rest of the body; rarely transverse bars on the legs, generally on the under-side of the front legs, still more rarely a very faint ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Men and women went darting about like the big yellow gnats that we see at sundown on the western coast of our island when the bay is hazy. The whole history of that century in both Am-ri-ka and Yoo-rup might well be written around the fact of transit, for transit was the spinal cord of the whole social, civil, and political order. Man-life then seemed to oscillate more rapidly than ever before, as if in sympathy with the vibration of ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... legend that mountain sheep rams jump off cliffs and alight upon their horns? I think not. People now know enough about anatomy, and the mental traits of wild sheep, to know that nothing of that kind ever occurred save by a dreadful accident, followed by the death of the sheep. No spinal column was ever made by Nature or developed by man that could endure without breaking a headforemost fall from the top of a cliff to ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home for spines, why, what must the man be like who ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... brain and heart through the spinal cord, probably on account of its vibratory or wave motion, which stimulates the nerve-centres. . ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... rushing into the treacherous embraces of the close hugger somewhat unadvisedly, and is fortunate if he escapes with his life as a penalty for his rashness. The dog of experience always gripes his marsupial adversary by the butt end of the tail, close to the rump, or at its juncture with the spinal vertebrae. Once the dog has thrown his kangaroo, he makes for the throat, which he gripes firmly, while at the same time he is careful to keep his own body as far as he conveniently can from the quarry's dangerous hind quarters. In this position dog and kangaroo work round and round ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... discovered another moving object; it was a wolverine, and it was stalking the beaver. When it drew near enough to the unsuspecting worker, it made a sudden spring and landed upon his back. A desperate fight ensued. The wolverine was trying to cut the spinal cord at the back of the beaver's neck; but the short, stout neck caused trouble, and before the wolverine had managed it, the beaver, realizing that the only chance for life was to make for the water-hole, lunged toward it, and with the wolverine still on his back, dived in. On ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... "flippers," adapting the animal for an active existence in the sea. The different joints of the backbone (vertebrae) also show the same adaptation to an aquatic mode of life, being hollowed out at both ends, like the biconcave vertebrae of Fishes. The spinal column in this way was endowed with the flexibility necessary for an animal intended to pass the greater part of its time in water. Though the Ichthyosaurs are undoubtedly marine animals, there is, however, reason ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... interrupted by Mrs. Longfield's plaintive voice reminding her invalid daughter that she had been sitting "to one side too long," and would "excite her spinal inflammation" if she did not "straighten up against the cushions of ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... long. Make the frame for the head by bending a light tough stick in a circle about 7 in. in diameter. Bind it tightly with a strong thread and through its center run the spine. Then tack on the arm stick 3 in. under the circle so that the spinal column crosses the arm stick exactly in the center. Wrap tightly with strong thread and tack on the two sticks that are to serve for the legs and body. The leg sticks should be fastened to the arm stick about 6 in. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... as a large, rather soft mass lying in the mid-line of the abdomen with its upper margin somewhat above the navel. With one hand, or with both if necessary, the mass is grasped in such a way that the fingers cover the top of it and pass backward toward the spinal column; the thumb remains in contact with the front of the organ. The womb is stroked and squeezed much as one kneads dough, and for this reason the procedure is technically called kneading. Such manipulations cause the muscle ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind leg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving the spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus, consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the sea-water ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the liveried crew Obeisant in Mammon's walk, Most deferent ply the facial screw, The spinal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Now look," he admonished her. "Do you see this thing?" and he extended what appeared to be a bundle of tentacles from the posterior part of his head. "There is an aperture just back of the rykor's mouth and directly over the upper end of his spinal column. Into this aperture I insert my tentacles and seize the spinal cord. Immediately I control every muscle of the rykor's body—it becomes my own, just as you direct the movement of the muscles of your body. I feel what the rykor would feel if he had a head and brain. If he is hurt, ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... gave him water from my canteen, inquired his name and if he was badly hurt. He was General Francis C. Barlow, of New York. He had been shot from his horse while grandly leading a charge. The ball had struck him in front, passed through the body and out near the spinal cord, completely paralyzing him in every limb; neither he nor I supposed he could live for one hour. I desired to remove him before death from that terrific sun. I had him lifted on a litter and borne to the shade in the ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the normal type of either his father's or his mother's family. It would therefore seem that any too sudden corrective of defect will result in anomaly, and, in the case under notice, direct mingling of perfect health with spinal weakness had germinated into a marked yearning for the heroic ages, for the supernatural as contrasted with the meanness of the routine of existence. And now before closing this psychical investigation, and picking up the thread of the story, which will of course be no more ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... head in each case agrees. In the American mound three rivers (also objects of worship with the ancients) were evidently identified. The number three was a sacred number in all ancient mythologies. The sinuous winding and articulations of the vertebral spinal arrangement are anatomically perfect in the Argyleshire mound. The gentlemen present with Mr. Phene during his investigation state that beneath the cairn forming the head of the animal was found a megalithic chamber, in which was a quantity of charcoal and burnt ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... uniform, and he would always have to be the blank file in a column of fours, as four of his size would spread across the street, and to "cover off" the four behind them would just march in the rear of their spinal columns, having a driveway between ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... distance. If the animal were able to come up with its pursuer, the latter endeavoured to seize it by the horn at the moment when it lowered its head, and to drive his dagger into its neck. If the blow were adroitly given it severed the spinal cord, and the beast fell in a heap as if struck by lightning. A victory over such animals was an occasion for rejoicing, and solemn thanks were offered to Assur and Ishtar, the patrons of the chase, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... order, which, at that time, were plentiful in the coast sections of the more southern of the slave-holding States. They were called "racers" because of their long legs, slender bodies, and great capacity for running; and "Razor Backs" on account of the prominence of the spinal column. The origin of this particular species of the porcine tribe is unknown, but there is a tradition to the effect that their progenitors were a part of the drove that came to the coast of Florida with De Soto when he started ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... smothered sound like a tap on a padded door, and then the beast stretched himself slowly out across my legs, and shivered, and died. That man opposite to you had leapt his horse over us both, and, while he was in the air, speared the boar through the spinal marrow. If he had been struck any where else he might still have torn me badly before the life was out of him. Neatly ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... get away when I pinch its toes? Doubtless, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal has now spontaneously drawn up its legs and arms, and it is sitting with its neck erect just as if it had not lost its head at all. I pinch its toes, and you see ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of morphology: thus if we could trace in the limbs of the Vertebrata, as we can in their ribs, traces of an apparent change from being processes of the vertebrae, it would be said that in each species of the Vertebrata the limbs were "metamorphosed spinal processes," and that in all the species throughout the class the limbs displayed a ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... Alphonse Daudet as a novelist is mainly built. They placed him, for the moment at all events, near the head of contemporary European literature. By this time, however, a physical malady, which Charcot was the first to locate in the spinal cord, had begun to exhaust the novelist's powers. This disease, which took the form of what was supposed to be neuralgia in 1881, racked him with pain during the sixteen remaining years of his life, and gradually destroyed his powers of locomotion. It ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... medicine to make her sleep, and it weakened her heart) asked me if I wouldn't like to take out some patients of his, and so I called for a very nice lady—a Mrs. Williams; you probably don't know her?—and after that a young girl with spinal trouble, and—and several others. They seemed to enjoy it, and I'm sure I did. Once I took a young girl that's staying here—she had a bad headache. She was a sweet girl, and I liked her. She said the drive ...
— Mrs. Dud's Sister • Josephine Daskam
... the spinal cord first appears as a tube in the axis of the back, and the cartilaginous column closes round it. All bone appears first as membrane, then cartilage, and finally ossifies. This is the order both in past evolution ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... at all. He told himself he would far better allow Cissie Dildine to pass and repass unspoken to, instead of trying to arrange an accidental meeting. But the brown man's nerves wouldn't hear to it. That automatic portion of his brain and spinal column which, physiologists assert, performs three fourths of a man's actions and conditions nine tenths of his volitions— that part of Peter wouldn't consider it. It began to get jumpy and scatter havoc in Peter's thoughts at the mere ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... limbs are there, apparently without blood or muscles or bones. This affection, which is not connected with anything known to science, spread to the arms and hands, and we then supposed it to be a disease of the spinal cord. Doctors and remedies only made matters worse until at last my poor daughter could not be moved without dislocating either the shoulders, the arms, or the knees. I kept an admirable surgeon almost constantly in the house, who, with the doctor, or doctors (for many came out of interest in the ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac |
