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Excrescence   Listen
Excrescence

noun
1.
Something that bulges out or is protuberant or projects from its surroundings.  Synonyms: bulge, bump, extrusion, gibbosity, gibbousness, hump, jut, prominence, protrusion, protuberance, swelling.  "The hump of a camel" , "He stood on the rocky prominence" , "The occipital protuberance was well developed" , "The bony excrescence between its horns"
2.
(pathology) an abnormal outgrowth or enlargement of some part of the body.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Excrescence" Quotes from Famous Books



... prerogative, altogether incompatible with anything like a free government. But to judge the matter rightly, we must take into view the actual position of the Jews at that time. Far from forming an integral part of the commonwealth, they were regarded as alien to it, as a mere excrescence, which, so far from contributing to the healthful action of the body politic, was nourished by its vicious humors, and might be lopped off at any time, when the health of the system demanded it. Far from being protected by the laws, the only aim of the laws, in reference to them, was to define ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... 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

... corpses out of the shallow graves, and devouring bodies. I 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 own accord! This ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... enters a neighbouring wood, and selects 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... 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 which exuded from ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... in the oriel room, so called 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, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... a horse. She was great at walking, and recommended that exercise strongly to all young ladies as an antidote to every ill, from love to chilblains. She was short and dapper in person; not ugly, excepting that her nose was long, and had a little bump or excrescence at the end of it. She always wore a bonnet, even at meal times; and was supposed by those who were not intimately acquainted with the mysteries of her toilet, to sleep in it; often, indeed, she did sleep in it, and ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... The curious excrescence on the bill of the drake nukta or comb-duck is now much enlarged. This betokens the approach of the nesting season ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar

... taking Notice of that celebrated Complaint of Milton with which it opens, and which certainly deserves all the Praises that have been given it; tho as I have before hinted, it may rather be looked upon as an Excrescence, than as an essential Part of the Poem. The same Observation might be applied to that beautiful Digression upon Hypocrisie, in the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... covering their persons from the waist to the knee, and even lower. The most remarkable article of dress is one which I have vaguely understood to constitute a part of the equipment of my own fair countrywomen—in a word, the veritable bustle. Among the belles of Axim, there is a reason for the excrescence which does not exist elsewhere; for the little children ride astride of the maternal bustle, which thus becomes as useful, as it is unquestionably ornamental. Fashion, however, has evidently more to ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... humorous characters; Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, and Mrs. Elton in the first class, and Harriet Smith in the second. And the humour is always essential to the delineation of character—it is never an excrescence. It also depends more on what is said than on any tricks of speech; there are no catch-words, and every one speaks practically the same excellent English. Besides this, Emma also gives a very good instance ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

... now a man going over that is a good soldier, but a debauched man, which the place need not to have. And so used these words: "That this place was to the King as my Lord Carnarvon says of wood, that it is an excrescence of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts." Thence away to Sir G. Carteret, whom I find taking physic. I staid talking with him but a little, and so home to church, and heard a dull sermon, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... 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 ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... ('Proc. Zoolog. Soc.' 1865, p. 716) remarks that he knows no species which presents any remarkable sexual distinction; but it is stated ('Naturalist's Library, Birds,' vol. ix. p. 117) that the excrescence at the base of the beak in the Carpophaga oceanica is sexual: this, if correct, is an interesting point of analogy with the male Carrier, which has the wattle at the base of its beak so much more developed than in the female. Mr. Wallace informs me that in the sub-family of the Treronidae the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... excrescence or hut on the roof—about ten feet by six in dimensions—which formed—their residence. Behind this, hiding itself as it were and almost invisible, nestled a smaller excrescence or offshoot. It was a mere bandbox of a thing, measuring five feet by four; it had a window about twelve inches ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... word, Kamilaroi Dialect of New South Wales. [W. Ridley, 'Kamilaroi,' p. 25, derives it from Kulu, seed, but it is just as likely from Kolle, water.—J. Mathew.] A hollowed knot of a tree, used as a seed vessel, or for holding water. The word is applied to the excrescence on the tree as well as to the vessel; a bush hand has been heard to speak of a hump-backed ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... 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, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... (rodent ulcer), begins, usually on the face, as a minute, firm, reddish or yellowish tubercle, as an aggregation of such, as a warty excrescence, or as a localized degenerative seborrh[oe]ic patch. The latter lesion (known also as keratosis senilis, old-age atrophic patches), consisting of a yellowish or yellowish-brown greasy or hardened ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon

... of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest she after a few weeks became numb—no new or strange phenomenon in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at least saw only those affected like herself—and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... the tree, with a whole day's toil, when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny. It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence, that the bark, just above the inscription, had put forth an excrescence, shaped not unlike a hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate. Such, at least, was its ...
— The Threefold Destiny (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... unequalled in all the world. The grim towers rise boldly without ornament or decoration of any kind, and are cowled by a peculiarly strange roofing. The triple porch is denuded of its decorative statues, and there is a rank Renaissance excrescence in the rear which is unseemly, but for all that, as a mediaeval religious monument of rank, it appeals to all quite as forcibly as the brilliantly florid cathedral at Beauvais, or the richly proud Amiens, its nearest ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... into a slot at the end of which lies a little dark-brown body. In a newly-opened flower five of these little bodies may be seen between the horns of the crown, at equal distances around it. This tiny brown excrescence is hard and horny, with a notch in its face. It is continuous with and forms the end of the slot in which the visitor's foot is caught. Into this he must draw his foot or claw, and finding it rather tightly held, must give a vigorous jerk to get it free. Attached to either side ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... the king told that he was the progeny of a virgin cow and a moonbeam, that he must be black, with a white triangular spot on the forehead, the likeness of an eagle on his back, and on his side the crescent moon. There must be two kinds of hair on his tail, and on his tongue an excrescence in the form of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... represented his views better than those who are in favor of immediate emancipation. In explanation of his views on this subject the President said that in his speeches he had frequently used as an illustration the case of a man who had an excrescence on the back of his neck, the removal of which in one operation would result in the death of the patient, while tinkering it off by degrees would ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... On cutting down an ash-tree in the neighbourhood of Linton, Cambridgeshire, in 1818, a knob on its trunk was lopped off, and this medal discovered in its core! It was probably the cause of the excrescence, having been, perhaps, thrust under the bark to escape the danger of its apparently political allusion. The Linton carrier purchased it for half-a-crown, and from him it passed in 1820 into hands whence ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various

... 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, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... common standard of conventional propriety; and the most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as they could be translated into the language of measured prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to him like an excrescence; and his imagination was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on the permanent ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... 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 ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... persons, especially satyrs, fauns, and sensual powers, consisted in irregular excrescence and decrement of features, especially in flatness of the upper part of the nose, and projection of the end of it into ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... friends at Carshalton, and gave me three birch stems to look at just outside the window, did I perceive it to be a primal question about them, what it is that blanches that dainty dress of theirs, or, anticipatorily, weaves. What difference is there between the making of the corky excrescence of other {173} trees, and of this almost transparent fine white linen? I perceive that the older it is, within limits, the finer and whiter; hoary tissue, instead of hoary hair—honouring the tree's aged body; the outer sprays have no silvery light on their youth. Does the membrane thin itself into ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... disgraceful, success or failure is indifferent, as it regards the honor of the actors. Among the Dragoners, a great bully of a fellow, who appeared to be their leader, wielded a huge club, formed from an oak limb, with a gnarled excrescence on the end, heavy enough to battle with an elephant. A student remarkable for his strength in the arms and hands, griped the fellow so hard about the wrist that his fingers opened, and let the club fall. It was seized, and brought off as a trophy. Such is the history of the Bully Club. It became ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... of a foot or more, and there were deeper pockets. Dickson made the passage slowly and miserably, sometimes crying out with pain as his toes struck a sharper flint, once or twice sitting down on a boulder to blow like a whale, once slipping on his knees and wetting the strange excrescence about his middle, which was his tucked-up waterproof. But the crossing was at length achieved, and on a patch of sea-pinks he dried himself perfunctorily and hastily put on his garments. Old Bill, who seemed to be regardless of wind ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... bottom of the valley he urged his pony on a little way, pulling it to a halt on the flat, rock-strewn top of an isolated excrescence of earth surrounded by a sea of sagebrush, dried bunch grass, and sand. Dismounting he stretched his legs to disperse the saddle weariness. He stifled a yawn, lazily plunged a hand into a pocket of his trousers, produced tobacco and paper ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... the extremest divergences of one kind from another. Their names are the Carrier, the Pouter, the Fantail, and the Tumbler. In the large diagrams 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 ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley

... towards every new discovery seems stupid and almost insane. They had a crystallized system of truth, perfect, symmetrical—it wanted no novelty, no additions; every addition or growth was an imperfection, an excrescence, a deformity. Progress was unnecessary and undesired. The Church had a rigid system of dogma, which must be accepted in its entirety on pain of being treated as a heretic. Philosophers had a cast-iron system ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... for instance, the whole Inez episode at first sight might appear to be an excrescence on my narrative, of which the object is to describe how I met a certain very wonderful woman and what I heard and experienced in her company. Yet it is not really so, since had it not been for the Inez adventure, it is quite clear that I should never have reached the home of ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... but they kindly made room for me, and plastered my portmanteau, like an excrescence, on ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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

... for the relics of St. 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

... get over the idea of falseness which certainly Lizzie's eye was apt to convey to the beholder. There was no unclean horse's tail. There was no get-up of flounces, and padding, and paint, and hair, with a dorsal excrescence appended with the object surely of showing in triumph how much absurd ugliness women can force men to endure. She was lithe, and active, and bright,—and was at this moment of her life at her best. Her ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable—but teach him, inoculate him with chess! It is well, perhaps, that ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... their disgust at war secretly were not unwilling to wink at violence to end the curse. I could not but reflect on the dangerous ground on which most of them were treading, shaking the basis of all civilization in order to cut out one modern excrescence. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... more fear Creon: To take that hunch-backed monster in my arms! The excrescence of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... regard the whole discussion on organization as a huge and unnecessary excrescence on his argument, for he would have come to his point quite as effectually, and much more directly, had he said nothing at all about an organized being, and insisted merely on one, whether material or spiritual, possessing powers of intelligence, contrivance, and design; for it is ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... 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 are formed. An excessive ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... and a worse crime against his own race. The father of this girl had been guilty of a sin against society for which others—for which he, George Tryon—must pay the penalty. As slaves, negroes were tolerable. As freemen, they were an excrescence, an alien element incapable of absorption into the body politic of white men. He would like to send them all back to the Africa from which their forefathers had come,—unwillingly enough, he would admit,—and he would like especially ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... great mountain spur, whose base ran to within two or three hundred yards of our resting-place. In appearance it roughly resembled a mighty Napoleonic nose. The butts ran right up the ridge of that organ; and nine hundred feet above where we sat, just below an excrescence locally known as "The Pimple," ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... with the 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

... keenly jealous of new arrivals in the shape of strange jackals, took upon himself to catch Jinks by his foreleg, a mistake he had reason to regret, for Jinks—who was abnormally strong, and possessed the peculiar little excrescence shaped like a cone on his head, and which generally denotes a leader of a pack—suddenly seized his opponent by his throat, and refused to let go until he was dead. Then, shaking him as though he had been a little terrier, he ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin

... north, in the middle distance, jutting out into the sea, is a low black line of land, with one excrescence. This is Cape Royds, with Shackleton's old hut upon it; the excrescence is High Peak, and this line marks the first land upon the eastern side of McMurdo Sound which you can see, and indeed is ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... with a troubled eye, the house had one salient feature in the shape of a square tower, which stood out from the facade fronting the river, and rose to nearly twice the height of the main roof. But this curious excrescence only added to the forbidding character of as gloomy a mansion as one could wish to approach by stealth at ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... and been built upon again and again as the unsubstantial mud dwellings have crumbled away, until they have gradually developed into mounds that rise like huge mole-hills above the plain, and on which the present houses are built. Near each village is a graveyard, also forming a mound-like excrescence on the dead level of the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... the knoll, on the steepest side, just behind their camp, was a huge rock, like an excrescence, although the rest of the elevation was almost smooth. As the glare of their fire fell on it at nightfall, it looked like the ruins of an ancient castle perched ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston

... literature. Pure rationalism has nothing to add to this destructive onslaught. The tone is not truly philosophic, because the writer habitually regards the notion of a God as an abnormal and morbid excrescence, and not as a natural growth in human development. He takes no trouble, and it would have been an incredible departure from the mental fashion of the time if he had taken any trouble, to explain theology, or to ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... Excitement ekscitego. Exclaim ekkrii. Exclamation, point of signo ekkria. Exclude eksigi. Exclusion eksigeco. Exclusive ekskluziva. Excommunicate ekskomuniki. Excoriation defrotajxo. Excrement ekskremento. Excrescence elkreskajxo. Excruciate turmentegi. Exculpate senkulpigi. Excursion ekskurso. Excusable pardonebla. Excuse pardoni, senkulpigi. Execrable abomena. Execrate malbenegi. Execute (to do) fari. Execute ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... laevior. . . rotundo Horti tubere, quod creavit unda. Ibid. 'A head, to speak in the gardener's style, is a bulbous excrescence, growing up between the shoulders. '—G. A. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... help this man. I would teach him, by noble precept and law-precept, by noble example most of all, that Mammonism was not the essence of his or of my station in God's Universe; but the adscititious excrescence of it; the gross, terrene, godless embodiment of it; which would have to become, more or less, a godlike one. By noble real legislation, by true noble's-work, by unwearied, valiant, and were it wageless effort, in my Parliament and in my Parish, I ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... me the honour of writing, with the accompaniments you so kindly forwarded, have my warm and grateful acknowledgments. The selection of ten miles square for the seat of government appeared to me at the time, and has continued, an excrescence on the Constitution, like a wart on a fair skin. Neither the foreign ministers nor the resident citizens in the federal city have any thing to alarm them under state laws. There is no finger of blood ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... catches her small brown hands in a close grip. The new Lady Rylton plants a very shapely little foot against an excrescence in the wall, and in a second has her ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford

... edition, except when they were confuted by subsequent annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant excrescence of diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Rowe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shewn him, as he would ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... one," cried the lad, as with a rushing, heavy beating sound of its wings, a great bird flow directly over their heads, uttering a hoarse cry, and with its huge curved bill bearing a curious, nearly square, excrescence on the top, plainly seen as the ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn

... splendor, is simply the restlessness of over-excited, servile monkeys each imitating the other, and each corrupting the other to, through sophistication, end up in worry and boredom. Human culture, accordingly, is in itself bad, while the fruit it produces is merely excrescence or poison.—Of what use are the sciences? Uncertain and useless, they afford merely a pasture-ground ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... After all, a wit was still a human being, and much more nearly related to us than an ancient Greek. Pope's style, when he is at his best, has the merit of being thoroughly alive; there are no dead masses of useless verbiage; every excrescence has been carefully pruned away; slovenly paraphrases and indistinct slurrings over of the meaning have disappeared. He corrected carefully and scrupulously, as his own statement implies, not with a view of transferring as large a portion as possible ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... first stranger that she meets, who happens to be none other than Geronte himself, the deceit practised upon him by Scapin. The farce of the sack into which Scapin makes Geronte to crawl, then bears him off, and cudgels him as if by the hand of strangers, is altogether a most inappropriate excrescence. Boileau was therefore well warranted in reproaching Molire with having shamelessly allied Terence to Taburin, (the merry-andrew of a mountebank). In reality, Molire has here for once borrowed, not, as he frequently did, from the Italian ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... recklessly tender towards Priscilla, and never once seem to think of the effect which it might have upon her heart. But the man, as I have endeavored to explain, was thrown completely off his moral balance, and quite bewildered as to his personal relations, by his great excrescence of a philanthropic scheme. I used to see, or fancy, indications that he was not altogether obtuse to Zenobia's influence as a woman. No doubt, however, he had a still more exquisite enjoyment of Priscilla's silent sympathy with his purposes, so unalloyed with criticism, and ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... arguments as long as possible, and refrained from forcing events. If substantial independence of Parliament and the Ministry could be secured, he was willing to allow the King a vague or imaginary headship until in the course of years that excrescence should slough away. ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... its name is not attractive, is excellent when cooked. It has, indeed, a very fine flavour, is firm, white, and very rich. In appearance it is like a diminutive dolphin. It has double fins in addition to those on its back, and a long beard-like excrescence hangs from each side of its mouth. One was more than sufficient for our supper, but Boxer had no objection to eat the remainder. I was very glad my faithful dog had come, as he assisted to keep watch, and was not likely to allow any foe to approach the camp without giving us warning. ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston

... perhaps, as a sick man consciously incurable consults at last only his lawyer: that was what made him so different from every one else. Ralph had something of this same quality, this appearance of thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship; but in Ralph it was an anomaly, a kind of humorous excrescence, whereas in Mr. Osmond it was the keynote, and everything was in harmony with it. She was certainly far from understanding him completely; his meaning was not at all times obvious. It was hard to see what he meant for instance ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... with a well defined winter the winged males appear as soon as white frosts are no more usual, and copulate with the unwieldy limbless female, that looks more like a gall or morbid excrescence, than a living animal. Shortly after the young ones are perceptible near the withered body of their mother, covered by waxy secretions that look somewhat ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... cannot be higher than the dry land. Proof: Water could only be higher than the Earth, 1. If it were excentric, or 2. If it were concentric, but had some excrescence. ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton

... outset, this is not merely an assimilated expression, or an unauthorized nominative, or a weakly-supported clause, or any such trifling thing. Although be it remarked in passing, I am not aware of a single such trifling excrescence which we are not able at once to detect and to remove. In other words, this is not at all a question, like the rest, about the genuine text of a passage. Our inquiry is of an essentially different kind, viz. Are these twelve ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... teeth and the body is well supplied with fins. The head in Fig. 144 reminds one forcibly of the catfish. The snout is furnished with two horn-like appendages; tooth-like features are formed by setting in pellets of clay, and the gills are indicated by a punctured excrescence at the side of the mouth. In other cases a high, sharp cone is set upon the middle of the head (Fig. 145). It is channeled down the sides, as ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes

... of liberty, is harsh, vindictive, and intolerant, and totally reckless as to the character of the allies which it brings to the aid of its cause. When the genuine spirit of liberty animates the body of a people to a thorough examination of their affairs, it leads to the excision of every excrescence which may have fastened itself upon any of the departments of the government, and restores the system to its pristine health and beauty. But the reign of an intolerant spirit of party amongst a free people seldom fails to result in a dangerous accession ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Harrison • James D. Richardson

... culminating in the volcanic ridge which runs lengthwise of the oval-shaped island. The culminating peak of the great volcanic mass, for St. Vincent is nothing more, is Mont Garou, of which La Soufriere is a sort of lofty excrescence in the northwest, 4,048 feet high, and flanking the main peak ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... owing to the elaborate detail with which its great surface is wrought all over, like the chasing of a lady's jewel-box, and yet so grand! There is a dwelling-house on one side, gray with antiquity, which has apparently grown out of it like an excrescence; and though a good-sized edifice, yet the cathedral is so large that its vastness is not in the least deformed by it. If it be a dwelling-house, I suppose it is inhabited by the person who takes care of the cathedral. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... earth. Sail and steam, trains of creaking wagons, troops of hardy horsemen, are all bent Westward Ho! Desertion takes the troops and sailors from camp and fleet pell-mell to the Sacramento valley. A shabby excrescence of tent and hut swells Yerba Buena to a town. In a few months it leaps into a city's rank. Over the prairies, toward the sandy Humboldt, long emigrant trains are crawling toward the golden canyons of the Sierras. The restless blood of the Mexican War pours across ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... 250. Convexity. — N. convexity, prominence, projection, swelling, gibbosity[obs3], bilge, bulge, protuberance, protrusion; camber, cahot [obs3][N. Am.], thank-ye-ma'am [U.S.]. swell. intumescence; tumour[Brit], tumor; tubercle, tuberosity[Anat]; excrescence; hump, hunch, bunch. boss, embossment, hub, hubble [convex body parts] tooth[U.S.], knob, elbow, process, apophysis[obs3], condyle, bulb, node, nodule, nodosity[obs3], tongue, dorsum, bump, clump; sugar loaf &c. (sharpness) 253; bow; mamelon[obs3]; molar; belly, corporation|!, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... black and inanimate hull. So quiet and motionless did she seem, that one, who had never been instructed in the matter, might readily have believed her a fixture in the sea, some symmetrical and enormous excrescence thrown up by the waves, with its mazes of lines and pointed fingers, or one of those fantastic monsters that are believed to exist in the bottom of the ocean, darkened by the fogs and tempests of ages. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper

... disguised. For it was Bob himself who had just ridden round a contiguous cape of lignum, and now, dismounting and throwing his reins on the ground, joined our unappreciative group. After folding his interminable legs in two places, and clasping his hands round his shins, this excrescence on society remarked, in ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—the subject, Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of chick-pea (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and somewhat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... corn-merchant. It was one of the few stone houses of the district, a compact snug-looking nucleus from which an irregular wing, rather higher than the main building, advanced to the very edge of the roadway. A much smaller wing, merely an excrescence, on the other side, seemed as if it had gone as far as it could in the direction of making a quadrangle and had then given over the task to a broad low wall. The square piece of garden, though untidy and ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... but no cordiality in the reply. If Mr. Hammond was a sensitive man, touchily conscious of his own obscurity, he must have felt that he was not wanted at Fellside—that he was an excrescence, matter in the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... on the heels of which he was travelling. He remarked the pregnant silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London

... move Excalibur once he had decided to remain where he was; so Eileen and the curate agreed to regard him as a sort of artificial excrescence, like the buttress in a fives court. If the ball hit him, as it frequently did, the player waiting for it was at liberty either to play it or claim a let. This arrangement added a piquant and pleasing variety to what is too often—especially ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay

... 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 deity dripping with ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... three Acts of a play which must have been powerful had he not extended it to five, and, had he not attempted to centre the interest on a character which, charming as an incidental sketch, is, as an essential, an excrescence. Practically the play is at an end with the finish of the Third Act. Why lug in the Abbe Constantin? And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various

... favourable impression of Sens gained by this fleeting view, is more than justified on nearer acquaintance. The Cathedral, externally less imposing than those of Bourges, Rheims, or even Rodez and Beauvais, is of a piece alike without and within, no tasteless excrescence disfiguring its outer walls, little or no modern tawdriness to be seen inside, an architectural gem of great purity. For the curious in such matters, the sacristy offers many wonders, among others a large fragment of the true ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... passes along—here dexterously severing the leg of a Chippendale chair, and there hacking a piece off a Louis Quatorze couch—leads the way to an annexe he has just built for the reception of his treasured books. From the outside this excrescence on the Castle has but a poverty-stricken look. It is, to tell the truth, made of corrugated iron. But that is a cloak that cunningly covers an interior of rare beauty and rich design. Arras of cloth of gold hangs loosely on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various

... I might at least Eliminate, decrassify my 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 ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... but that Adam had originally been created with a tail, and that among the various experiments and improvements which were made in form and organization before he was finished, the tail was removed as an inconvenient appendage, and of the excrescence or superfluous part, which was then lopped off, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl's hair must be cut off entirely; I will send a barber to-morrow: and I see others who have far too much of the excrescence—that tall girl, tell her to turn round. Tell all the first form to rise up and direct their faces ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... fiends, are disagreeable. I'm sure that's why we've been so happy together,—because you've never taken anything I've done or said that was foolish or unkind personally. You've always known it was just so much irrelevant rubbish, just an excrescence, a passing sickness; never, never your real Chris who ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley

... chiseled limbs, while 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 Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark

... the Town Hall, though not then finished, looked the same from New Street; and the portico of the Society of Artists' rooms stood over the pavement then. With these exceptions I only know one more building that has not been pulled down, or so altered as to be unrecognisable. The exemption is the excrescence called Christ Church, which still disfigures the very finest site in ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... the most destructive insect-pests known to the farmer: they frequently cause the death of the whole or part of the plant attacked. Now, we may suppose that the secretions of certain of these insects caused a swelling to appear where the larvae lived, and on this excrescence the larvae fed. It is easy to see that the greater the excrescence, and the greater the tendency of the larvae to feed upon it, instead of destroying the vital tissues, the smaller is the amount of harm to the plant. Now the continued life and vitality of the plant is beneficial to the larvae, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... pure emotion, such lofty subject for scientific speculation, and such deep lessons of natural religion, as only the work of a Deity can impress, and only the spirit of an immortal can feel: they should remember that the slightest deformity, the most contemptible excrescence, can injure the effect of the noblest natural scenery, as a note of discord can annihilate the expression of the purest harmony; that thus it is in the power of worms to conceal, to destroy, or to violate, what angels could not restore, create or consecrate; and that the right, which every ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... 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 May-apple does. But let him beware, as he is likely to, of the similar looking, but hollow, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... were of a pale gold colour with bright blue spots; others with different shades of brown, and blue, white, or red spots. They all turned a dark red on being put into spirits. The smaller kinds had a round ball or excrescence on one side just below the head. I observed today that the eel-fish carries its eggs in a bag under the belly; the eggs were of a bright red colour. Two barnacles were caught; also a new and very ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... outside the town rose a picturesque building. Originally it had been a mere case to hold people. The shell had been so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closely drawn over the accommodation granted, that the grim character of what was beneath showed through it, as the shape of a body is visible under ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... time, though they are the least religious and least complicated part of church architecture, and in no way essential to the church; indeed, Saint Bernard thought them an excrescence due to pride and worldliness, and this is merely Saint Bernard's way of saying that they were an ornament created to gratify the artistic sense of beauty. Beautiful as they are, one's eyes must drop ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... made my bush walks for me! Every ridge, plain, and bend had its name and probably legend; each bird a past, every excrescence of nature a ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... looked what he was, a strong and honest young farmer. To-day, in his Sunday broadcloth, with a brilliant blue neck scarf, a brass horseshoe pin, and a large bunch of primroses in his button-hole, he looked a blot, an excrescence, on the sunny earth. Personally, he might have been tall, but for a pronounced stoop; fair, but that he was burnt brick colour; smooth-faced, but for the multitude of lines and furrows, resulting from long exposure to the open air. His voice I couldn't help ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... rank of an artist." We do not exactly see how this judgment arises out of his definition of "taste." But it may be fair to follow him still closer on this point. "The imitation of the ancients was, essential, characteristic, ideal. The first cleared nature of accident, defect, excrescence, (which was in fact his definition of nature, as so cleared;) the second found the stamen which connects character with the central form; the third raised the whole and the parts to the highest degree of unison." This ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull-neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... fortitude—I have sought to imbue myself with the lessons of wisdom. It will not do. My hair has become nearly grey—my voice, unused now to utter sound, comes strangely on my ears. My person, with its human powers and features, seem to me a monstrous excrescence of nature. How express in human language a woe human being until this hour never knew! How give intelligible expression to a pang none but I could ever understand!— No one has entered Rome. None will ever come. I smile bitterly at the delusion I have ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... 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

... back?" I asked, walking around the odd, dangling figures, hanging like bloated metal skeletons from their chains. I had thought the bodies were perfect globes; I could see now that at the rear there was a humplike excrescence ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... largest opium business under heaven. But the British case is highly complicated; it implies the livelihood of millions; and must be reformed, when it can be reformed at all, with prudence. This French business, on the other hand, is a nostrum and a mere excrescence. No native industry was to be encouraged: the poison is solemnly imported. No native habit was to be considered: the vice has been gratuitously introduced. And no creature profits, save the Government at Papeete—the not very enviable gentlemen ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a third party made its appearance in the politics of Coldriver, and Marvin Towne was announced as its candidate for the legislature. It seemed a spontaneous excrescence, but, nevertheless, it caused a visit from that great man and citizen, Lafe Siggins, as well as a call from Mr. Crane, of Crane & Keith. Both astute gentlemen viewed the situation, and their alarm subsided. Indeed, both perceived where it could be turned to advantage. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland

... degraded in dignity, and loses its usefulness, exactly in proportion to its multiplication on the arch. In later architecture, especially English Tudor, it is sunk into dotage, and becomes a simple excrescence, a bit of stone pinched up out of the arch, as a cook pinches the paste at the edge of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... regards the church itself. The conventual buildings, like most French conventual buildings, have been rebuilt in an incongruous style, and now serve for the various public purposes of the local administration. In a near view of the north side, they form an ugly excrescence against the church, but they are lost in the more ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman

... her friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl's seat was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what she believed to be the danger of such a ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James

... knows how to manage it, to raise a smile at its absurdities, to rally, pique, and guide it into health and good-humor. He is very clever with the edge-tools in his surgeon's-case; he whips you out an excrescence before you are quite aware that he meditated an operation, and you find that he had chloroformed you with a shrewd writer's best anaesthetic, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... day, and this they do with this exception—that this spot, dark red in colour, has been seen for many years, turning as the planet turned. It was first noticed in 1878, and was supposed to be some great mountain or excrescence peeping up through the clouds. It grew stronger and darker for several years, and then seemed to fade, and was not so easily seen, and though still remaining it is now pale. But, most startling to say, it has shifted its position a little—that is, it takes a few seconds longer to get round ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton

... of the Panchamas were a part of Hinduism, its rejection would be a paramount duty both for them and for those like me who would not make a fetish even of religion and condone every evil in its sacred name. But, I believe that untouchability is no part of Hinduism. It is rather its excrescence to be removed by every effort. And there is quite an army of Hindu reformers who have set their heart upon ridding Hinduism of this blot. Conversion, therefore, I hold, is no ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... crooked (or too straight). Off with its head!" and, hey presto! the offending herb is not. Or, "That hill at C 39.d.7.4" is quite absurd; it's ridiculously lop-sided. I think we'll have a valley there instead." And lo! the absurd excrescence goes west in a puff ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various

... and picturesqueness are more popular than the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he has come to see. But at Whitby the railway, without doing any harm to the appearance of the town, at once gives a visitor as typical a scene of fishing-life ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... and commenced operations by the trial of an old woman who had long enjoyed the reputation of being a witch. Besides "spectral evidence," that is, the tales of the afflicted, a jury of women, appointed to make an examination, found upon her a wart or excrescence, adjudged to be "a devil's teat." A number of old stories were also raked up of dead hens and foundered cattle and carts upset, ascribed by the neighbors to her incantations. On this evidence she was brought in guilty, and hanged a few days after, when the court took an adjournment to the end ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... pocket. With the glasses on his 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 Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... neither enjoy the blessings of freedom, nor are yet in the bonds of slavery, is a great national evil, which every friend of his country most deeply deplores. They constitute a large mass of human beings, who hang as a vile excrescence upon society—the objects of a low debasing envy to our slaves, and to ourselves of universal suspicion and distrust.' * * 'If this process were continued a second term of duplication, it would produce the extraordinary result of forty white ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... 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, the other for Dying ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... carried by 491 to 90. All taxes became dependent on the Assembly. The broad principle on which Sieyes acted was that the Commons were really the nation. The upper classes were not an essential part of it. They were not even a natural and normal growth, but an offending excrescence, a negative quantity, to be subtracted, not to be added up. That which ought not to exist ought not to be represented. The deputies of the Third Estate appeared for the whole. Alone they were sufficient to govern it, for alone they were ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... these blemishes have become conspicuous. The moon, when it eclipses the sun, appears as a blemish in the body of that luminary. So a public departure from publicly professed principles will always be noticed, because it will be an excrescence or blemish, too large and protuberant, to be overlooked ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... served as a proboscis. The inside of the mouth, which has a sensible warmth in an animal newly killed, presented a very singular conformation. The tongue was almost motionless; but in front of the tongue there was a fleshy excrescence in each jaw, and a cavity lined with a very hard skin, into which the excrescence fitted. The manatee eats such quantities of grass, that we have found its stomach, which is divided into several cavities, and its intestines, (one hundred and eight feet long,) filled with it. On opening the animal ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind ultra-crepidarian—McCready's friend, Walker, very likely; but nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and might have been rendered very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an excrescence,—re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most purple piece in the whole web—the end of the fourth Act—and shouldered ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... excrescence marred the face of nature. The single horse Rowland owned, useless now while his crop matured, was breaking sod far to the west on the bank of the Jim River. Not a live thing other than human moved about the place. With them into this ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... belief, the first blackberry seen will banish warts. Watercress laid against warts was formerly said to drive them away. A rustic specific for whooping-cough in Hampshire is to drink new milk out of a cup made of the variegated holly; while in Sussex the excrescence found on the briar, and popularly known as "robin red-breast's cushion," is in demand. In consumption and diseases of the lungs, St. Fabian's nettle, the crocus, the betony, and horehound, have long been in request, and sea-southern-wood or mugwort, occasionally corrupted into "muggons," ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... preposition, belongs to a prolific family but not one of established and unimpeachable dignity. Hence the ex's, though they marry right and left, lead the other words to the altar and are never led thither themselves. Witness exclude, excommunicate, excrescence, excursion, exhale, exit, expel, expunge, expense, extirpate, extract; in no instance does ex fellow its connubial mate—it invariably precedes. The ports, on the other hand, are the peers of anybody. Some of them choose to remain single: ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... portions, coming from her forehead. Sands speaks of a woman who had a horn 6 3/4 inches long, growing from her head. There is an account of the extirpation of a horn nearly ten inches in length from the forehead of a woman of eighty-two. Bejau describes a woman of forty from whom he excised an excrescence resembling a ram's horn, growing from the left parietal region. It curved forward and nearly reached the corresponding tuberosity. It was eight cm. long, two cm. broad at the base, and 1 1/2 cm. at the apex, and was quite mobile. It began to grow at the age of eleven and had constantly ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould



Words linked to "Excrescence" :   wart, vegetation, nub, belly, pathology, caput, process, frontal eminence, gibbousness, growth, projection, snag, outgrowth, appendage, excrescent, nubble, bulge, occipital protuberance, mogul



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