"Vertebra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... capture the cabbage butterfly the first thing to do is to interest the creature by giving it a cabbage-leaf to play with. Then take the kitchen-chopper in the right hand, lift it high and bring it down with a crash on the third vertebra. Few butterflies repeat any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... the vertebral column of a full-grown Gorilla, in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, measures 27 inches along its anterior curvature, from the upper edge of the atlas, or first vertebra of the neck, to the lower extremity of the sacrum; that the arm, without the hand, is 31-1/2 inches long; that the leg, without the foot, is 26-1/2 inches long; that the hand is 9-3/4 inches long; the ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... covered with almost virgin forest. There may have been some elasticity in the auto, but we didn't seem to notice it. It seemed, in spite of shock absorbers, a perfect conductor, and the shock it received in passing over deep ruts and rough boulders was immediately communicated to the lowest vertebra of our spines to pass instantly along all the others, discharging itself in our teeth. One of the party, not having traveled over many rough roads, seemed to be enjoying the scenery in much the same manner as a drowning man might enjoy the Rhine. Whenever the machine skidded dangerously ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... hardly any such expansion, while the Mesozoic genera present a greater and greater development, until, in the Tertiary forms, the expanded ends become suturally united so as to form a sort of false vertebra. Hermann von Meyer, again, to whose luminous researches we are indebted for our present large knowledge of the organization of the older Labyrinthodonts, has proved that the Carboniferous 'Archegosaurus' had very imperfectly developed vertebral ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... and began to ascend it. Another shot through the back caused him to fall down dead. A flattened bullet was found in his tongue, having entered the lower part of the abdomen and completely traversed the body, fracturing the first cervical vertebra. Yet it was after this fearful wound that he had risen, and begun climbing with considerable facility. This also was a full-grown male of almost exactly the same dimensions as the other ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... repelled by the enthusiasm of Boucher de Perthes. The two colleagues found in the stony deposits made by the water dropping from the roof of the cave at Eyzies the bones of numerous animals extinct or departed to arctic regions—one of these a vertebra of a reindeer with a flint lance-head still fast in it, and with these were found ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... found, though in a very decomposed condition, and upon exposure to the air soon crumbled to pieces. The heads of the bones, a considerable portion of the skull, maxillary bones, teeth, neck bones, and the vertebra, were in their proper places, though the weight of the earth above them had driven them down, yet the entire frame was so perfect that it was an easy matter to trace all the bones; the bones of the cranium were slightly inclined toward the east. Around the neck were found ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... superintendence. The heart-burnings and jealousies about this matter are beyond all conception. Owen is both feared and hated, and it is predicted that if Gray and he come to be officers of the same institution, in a year or two the total result will be a caudal vertebra of each remaining after the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... bodies rotates, or a line about which a body or action is symmetrically disposed. In geometry, and in geometrical crystallography, the term denotes a line which serves to aid the orientation of a figure. In anatomy, it is, among other uses, applied to the second cervical vertebra, and in botany it means ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various |
