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Vertebra   Listen
noun
Vertebra  n.  (pl. vertebrae)  
1.
(Anat.) One of the serial segments of the spinal column. Note: In many fishes the vertebrae are simple cartilaginous disks or short cylinders, but in the higher vertebrates they are composed of many parts, and the vertebrae in different portions of the same column vary very greatly. A well-developed vertebra usually consists of a more or less cylindrical and solid body, or centrum, which is surmounted dorsally by an arch, leaving an opening which forms a part of the canal containing the spinal cord. From this dorsal, or neural, arch spring various processes, or apophyses, which have received special names: a dorsal, or neural, spine, spinous process, or neurapophysis, on the middle of the arch; two anterior and two posterior articular processes, or zygapophyses; and one or two transverse processes on each side. In those vertebrae which bear well-developed ribs, a tubercle near the end of the rib articulates at a tubercular facet on the transverse process (diapophysis), while the end, or head, of the rib articulates at a more ventral capitular facet which is sometimes developed into a second, or ventral, transverse process (parapophysis). In vertebrates with well-developed hind limbs, the spinal column is divided into five regions in each of which the vertebrae are specially designated: those vertebrae in front of, or anterior to, the first vertebra which bears ribs connected with the sternum are cervical; all those which bear ribs and are back of the cervicals are dorsal; the one or more directly supporting the pelvis are sacral and form the sacrum; those between the sacral and dorsal are lumbar; and all those back of the sacral are caudal, or coccygeal. In man there are seven cervical vertebrae, twelve dorsal, five lumbar, five sacral, and usually four, but sometimes five and rarely three, coccygeal.
2.
(Zool.) One of the central ossicles in each joint of the arms of an ophiuran.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vertebra" Quotes from Famous Books



... elongated, cylindrical, limbless, scaly form, and distinguished from lizards by the fact that the halves (RAMI) of the lower jaw are not solidly united at the chin, but movably connected by an elastic ligament. The vertebra are very numerous, gastrocentrous, and procoelous. And, of course, when they put it like that, you can see at once that a man might spend hours with combined entertainment and profit ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... that 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; ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley

... and Pongo monkeys, which are classed with those which make the nearest approach to man, have three vertebra ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various

... forms exhibiting 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 centra, while the Triassic Mastodonsaurus had ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... aims was to relax the flexor and tone up the extensor muscles and to open the human form into postures as opposite as possible to those of the embryo, which it tends so persistently to approximate in sitting, and in fatigue and collapse attitudes generally. The head must balance on the cervical vertebra and not call upon the muscles of the neck to keep it from rolling off; the weight of the shoulders must be thrown back off the thorax; the spine be erect to allow the abdomen free action; the joints of the thigh extended; the hand and arm ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... the puncture; (2) by extravasation of blood and the formation of a clot; and (3) by subsequent septic inflammation. Division or complete compression of the cord at or above the level of the fourth cervical vertebra is immediately fatal (as happens in judicial hanging). When the injury is below the fourth, the diaphragm continues forcibly in action, but the lungs are imperfectly expanded, and life will not be maintained for more than a day or two. When the ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... less indistinct he saw on a line with his eyes and twenty feet above the ground the dim silhouette of a grotesquely serrated back that gave the impression of a creature whose each and every spinal vertebra grew a thick, heavy horn. Only a portion of the back was visible to the ape-man, the rest of the body being lost in the dense shadows beneath the tree, from whence there now arose the sound of giant jaws ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... most pitifully. He had received a well-directed big-game arrow in the upper part of the abdomen, the arrow having been shot with such terrible force that about a foot of the shaft projected from the man's back. The arrow-head had been broken off by striking a vertebra. ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... crouches down, stretched out at full length along it, its colour harmonising with the bark, so that it cannot be seen by its unwary prey moving near it. As the deer or vicuna passes below, it launches itself on the doomed creature, and, drawing back its neck with its powerful claws, breaks the vertebra, and instantly kills it. Darwin states that he has frequently seen skeletons of huanucus ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... arrived, Goethe placed the matter in Schroter's hands. Again the head was raised from its pillow and carried back to the dismal Kasselgewolbe, where the bones still lay in a heap. The chief difficulty was to find the first vertebra; after that all was easy enough. With some exceptions, comparatively trifling, Schroter succeeded in reproducing the skeleton, which then was laid in a new coffin 'lined with blue merino,' and would seem (though we are not distinctly told) to have been deposited in the ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby

... is probably the smallest creature with a vertebra known to the world of science—a small fish—and it strikes one as amusing when the people count them out so jealously. But all their marketing is done on retail lines. Potatoes, eggs, and fruit sell for so much apiece. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... plain lozenge-shaped plates, thickly japanned, the forms are strangely complex and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,—the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus, the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... VERTEBRA (SPINAL COLUMN).—This is not so common among cattle as other animals. If the fracture should be through the body of the bone, there may be pressure on or laceration of the spinal cord, causing paralysis of all parts posterior to the seat of injury. Fractures ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... or three musket-bullets whistled after the fugitive as he ran—but he had nearly reached the town-gate, when his limbs, while strained to their utmost energy, suddenly failed beneath him. A rifle-shot had struck him in the vertebra of the neck, causing instantaneous death. Meanwhile, King Ben Cracko had made a bolt to escape, but was seized by his long calico robe; which, however, gave way, leaving him literally naked in the midst of his enemies. ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... maternal affection that the little thing bears to its young will often induce it to offer battle even to a man approaching it. When the young one is too tender to run about with the dam, she puts one foot on the prominence about the seventh cervical vertebra, or withers; the instinct of the young enables it to understand that it is now required to kneel down, and to remain quite still till it hears the bleating of its dam. If you see an otherwise gregarious she-antelope separated from the herd, and going alone ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... secrete the material for their construction from the water. Some of them are fixed to rocks, etc., while others roam at will. Strange as it may appear at first sight, some of the higher forms of the mollusca show signs of a rudimentary vertebra, and science has hazarded the opinion that the sea-squirts and similar creatures were descended from some ancestor from whom also descended the vertebrate animals, of which man is the highest form known today on this planet. We shall mention this connection in our ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... rendus' 1866 page 485 and 'Journal de l'Anat. et de la Phys.' Mai 1868.) thinks that he has proved that two distinct species have been domesticated, one in the East, and one in North Africa; and that these differed in the number of their lumbar vertebra and in various other parts; but M. Sanson seems to believe that osteological characters are subject to very little variation, which is certainly a mistake. At present no aboriginal or truly wild horse is positively known to exist; for it is commonly believed that ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... is essential that the vessel should be lying over a bone which will furnish the necessary resistance. The common carotid, for example, is pressed backward and medially against the transverse process (carotid tubercle) of the sixth cervical vertebra; the temporal against the temporal process (zygoma) in front of the ear; and the facial against the mandible at the anterior ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... give up the kingship, though, so again he struggled to free himself; but a sudden torturing pressure upon his vertebra brought an agonized "ka-goda!" from ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... which converted many of those who had been 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

... Medical Museum, of Washington. The operation was performed by Dr. Lamb. It was found that the ball, after fracturing the right eleventh rib, had passed through the spinal column in front of the spinal cord, fracturing the body of the first lumbar vertebra, driving a number of small fragments of bone into the adjacent soft parts, and lodging below the pancreas, about 2-1/2 inches to the left of the spine and behind the peritoneum, where it ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. VIII.: James A. Garfield • James D. Richardson

... four times, once clear through. I'll show you. Got a bad bayonet jab that doesn't seem to heal well. Then I had a dose of both gases—chlorine and mustard—and both all but killed me. Last I've a weak place in my spine. There's a vertebra that slips out of place occasionally. The least movement may do it. I can't guard against it. The last time it slipped out I was washing my teeth. I'm in mortal dread of this. For it twists me out of shape and hurts horribly. I'm afraid ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... the fresh site of Head Laager had been cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau among low, flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east, and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... yet you don't," he said grimly. "I want some information, and I'm going to get it out of you if I have to wring them out vertebra ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett

... executioner, or, perhaps, in order to furnish memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to examine the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had evidently retracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely, leaving the surfaces of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even; an appearance which could only have been produced by a heavy blow, inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... of intelligence, will, or consciousness. This scheme gave rise to many controversies, but has now passed into complete neglect.23 Of late years the tendency has been to assimilate instead of separating man and beast. Touching the outer sphere, we have Oken's homologies of the cranial vertebra. In regard to the inner sphere, we have a score of treatises, like Vogt's Pictures from Brute Life, affirming that there is no qualitative, but merely a quantitative, distinction between the human soul and the brute soul.24 Over this point the conflict is still thick and hot. But, however ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327 curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... the aspiration was for this proposed improvement upon our species, I cordially responded thereto; for every vertebra in my spine ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... nature, arrived at the same conclusion. The former, during a journey in the Hartz Mountains, at the sight of a bleached deer's skull, and the latter, upon picking up a sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery at Venice, were struck by the same thought: the skull is only a modified vertebra. Oken founded upon this idea and kindred analogies his profound philosophy of the system of animals and plants which comes very near to the evolution {35} theory, and in his cosmogony traces all organisms to a protoplasm in such a way ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... the ribs, twelve in number on each side, which are so distributed that each single muscle is attached, at one end, to the back portion of a rib and, at the other, to a projection of the vertebra a few inches above. The effect of their contraction is to' elevate the middle portion of the ribs and to turn them ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... Central Park, or Boston Common, or the Big Organ, to Hope? Not much—not anything, like the man's religion, to speak of. Hope bears up many a man, though it pays no bills to the grocer, milliner, tailor, or market man. It is the vertebra which steadies him plumb up to a positive perpendicular. A hopeless man or woman—how fearful! They very soon become round-shouldered, limp and weak, and drink little but unsizable sighs, and feed on all manner of dark and unhealthy things. It is TODD'S deliberate ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various

... and clammy, and there's not a single thump in his arteries," he said with solemn gravity; and letting fall Larry's hand he proceeded to examine his neck. "The vertebra broken, cracked, dislocated," he continued, in the same solemn tone. "D'ye see this black mark down his throat? it's amply sufficient to account for death. I hereby certify that this is a corpse before me, and authorise that he may be sent home to his ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston

... I straight began to guess For whom this mighty image was intended. "The head," I cried, "is Upton's, and the dress Is Parson Bartlett's own." True, his cloak ended Flush with his lowest vertebra, but no Sane sculptor ever made ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... had hitherto stood erect, stout-necked, through so many days and such various weather, must needs bow his head and lie down meekly on his side. The elephant and the beetle, equal now in a silent land where a vertebra and a red circulation counted for nothing, had to snuggle down where best they might, only a little less crowded than in their ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... horse like that, without learning;—that for poor mortals like us there must be sorrowful preparatory stages; and, having convinced them of this, set them to draw (if I had a good copy to give them) a horse's hoof, or his rib, or a vertebra of his thunder-clothed neck, or any other constructive ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... integral part of an object, as head, limb, vertebra, heart, nerve, tendon; stalk, leaf, corolla, stamen, pistil; plinth, frieze, etc. (ii) A name for every metaphysical part or abstract quality of an object, and for its degrees and modes; as extension, figure, solidity, weight; rough, smooth, elastic, friable; the ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... 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 two ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... to do, and they were too noisy at home, so I came over here. I'm through now, so I am going home. Cicely, I wish you would let me see how many vertebra there are left in Billy's tail. I think he hasn't but one. That is butchery, not surgery, for it doesn't leave him enough to waggle." And Phebe gathered up an armful of books ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... The vertebra should be disjointed, and the ribs cut on the inside through the bone only, on the thin end. Place it on the platter with the back up and cut across from left to right, where the ribs were divided, separating the small ends of the ribs from the thicker upper portion; then cut between ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln

... 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 ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... owners made the pitiful plea in extenuation of all the misery and indecency of the mines that without the labor of women and children the collieries must shut down, not only for lack of profit, but for the cogent reason that the flexible vertebra of childhood were especially adapted to the constrained positions required in the tunnels, and that there could be no good colliers unless as children they became inured to the privations and hardships of the life. The government tried to keep the report out of the hands of the indignant ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... upward in a slanting direction; having done this, carefully cut away on the root of the tail, at the same time freeing it wherever it sticks; then, when nothing but one bone, that is to say, the last caudal vertebra, holds it, slip the knife underneath and cut with a drawing motion upward. The tail is now ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... tomahawk or Indian hatchet. Upon a further examination many of the bones were 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 coarse beads that ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow

... flat; labial glands developed; ears moderate, rounded above; outer edge straight, emarginate opposite base of tragus, terminating in a small lobe; tragus lunate; tail long; last vertebra free. The face is more clad with fur than in other species of this genus; fur of the body pale, straw brown above, pale buff beneath. For a fuller description and illustration, see ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... sounding-board resonance of the bones of the head and chest. To secure this, the most important reinforcement of the tone, the larynx must be firmly held in a fixed position against the backbone, at the fifth cervical vertebra. All theories as to the registers of the voice, derived from laryngoscopic observation, ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... itself to us, are resolved by chemistry into some three-score supposed simple substances, some of these perhaps being only modifications of the same element. The shapes of beasts and birds, of reptiles and fishes, vary in every conceivable degree; yet a single vertebra is the pattern and representation of the framework of them all, from eels to elephants. The identity reaches still further,—across a mighty gulf of being,—but bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as indestructible as the scymitar-edge ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... 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 manner of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... eight o'clock the Khan becomes a trifle sentimental and very patriotic. Producing a pair of silver-mounted horse-pistols from a corner of the tent, and waving them theatrically about, he proclaims aloud his mighty devotion to the Shah. At nine o'clock Abdullah brings in the supper. The Khan's vertebra has become too limp and willowy to enable him to sit upright, and he has become too indifferent to such coarse, un-spiritual things as stewed chicken and musk-melons to care about eating any, while ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... in all directions—flexion, extension, lateral flexion, and rotation around the long axis of the column. Flexion is accompanied by compression of the intervertebral discs, and by a slight forward movement of each vertebra on the one below it. This forward movement is checked by the tension of the ligamenta flava which stretch ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... in the act of turning on the quarter-deck with his face towards the Enemy, when he received his wound: he instantly fell; and was carried to the cockpit, where he lived about two hours.[26] On being brought below, he complained of acute pain about the sixth or seventh dorsal vertebra, and of privation of sense and motion of the body and inferior extremities. His respiration was short and difficult; pulse weak, small, and irregular. He frequently declared his back was shot through, that he felt every ...
— The Death of Lord Nelson • William Beatty

... short thick trunk varies slightly in its relations on the two sides of the body. As the aorta bifurcates on the left side of the body of the fourth lumbar vertebra, the common iliac of the right side would have a longer course to pursue than that on the left, if both ended at corresponding points. However, this is not always the case, as has been pointed out by Mr. Adams ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... the thigh bones in the men's clubhouse, while of the remaining bones some are kept by the relations and the others thrown away in a charnel-house. Among the relics which the relations preserve are the lower arm bones, the shoulder-blades, the ribs, and the vertebra. The vertebra is often fastened to a bracelet; a couple of ribs are converted into a necklace; and the shoulder-blades are used to decorate baskets. The lower arm bones are generally strung on a cord, which is worn on solemn occasions round the neck so that ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... terminus, termini; alumnus, alumni; datum, data; stratum, strata; formula, formuloe; vortex, vortices; appendix, appendices; crisis, crises; oasis, oases; axis, axes; phenomenon, phenomena; automaton, automata; analysis, analyses; hypothesis, hypotheses; medium, media; vertebra, vertebroe; ellipsis, ellipses; genus, genera; fungus, fungi; minimum, ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... and tail. It died very speedily—for a shark—all muscular motion ceasing in less than fifteen minutes. It was my intention to prepare that useless and unornamental article so dear to sailors—a walking-stick made of a shark's backbone. But when I came to cut out the vertebra, I noticed a large scar, extending from one side to the other, right across the centre of the back. Beneath it the backbone was thickened to treble its normal size, and perfectly rigid; in fact, it had become ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... of a burrowing animal smaller than a ground hog was the frontal bone and upper portion of the face of a child of 8 or 10 years; 12 teeth are cut and others can be seen. It is shown in plate 20, c. Part of a cervical vertebra lay at the top of the skull, and there were fragments ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... by the fire; some with merely the clothes burnt off, leaving the naked body; some burnt to a deep brown tinge; others so far consumed that the viscera were exposed; while here and there the blackened ribs and vertebra were all that the fierce flames ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... pipes lay on the water like a veritable sea-serpent, extending to a long distance where the stuff had to be carried. At that point the pipe emerged from the water, and what looked very much like a vertebra or two of the serpent crossed the embankment, went down the other side, and there the muddy deposit was pouring out in a steady flow. Mr. Burt pointed out to me one part of the works where his pump had sent the stuff nearly half a mile away, and over undulating ground. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... cartilaginous vertebrae ossify and form a true backbone. I have described the process as if it were very simple. But only the student of comparative osteology can have any conception of the number of experiments which were tried in different groups before the definite mode of forming a bony vertebra was attained. At the same time the skull was developing in a somewhat similar manner. But the skull is far more complex in origin and undergoes far more numerous and important changes than the simpler vertebral column. Into its history we ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... but putting his hand behind the sleeping man's back, found some sensitive vertebra. With a yell, the man awoke and leaped to his feet. The conductor seized him by the arm and led him ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin

... difficult to describe, or which should be more carefully directed. The habitual rigidity of the spine, as compared with its possible freedom, is more noticeable in training, of course, than is that of any other part of the body. Each vertebra should be so distinctly independent of every other, as to make the spine as smoothly jointed as the toy snakes, which, when we hold the tip of the tail in our fingers, curve in all directions. Most of us ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... those most richly splotched are the ones that have been at the outside of the bundle. What new strength to meet life's troubles, what electric expansion of soul, come to the initiated upon the feel of the vertebra of his Malacca cane! ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... man extends only as far downwards as the last dorsal or first lumbar vertebra; but a thread-like structure (the filum terminale) runs down the axis of the sacral part of the spinal canal, and even along the back of the coccygeal bones. The upper part of this filament, as Prof. Turner informs me, is undoubtedly homologous with the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... Sauropsids, generally agree in the characteristic structure of the skull and brain, and this is notably different from that of the Mammals. In most of the reptiles and birds the skull is connected with the first cervical vertebra (the atlas) by a single, and in the Mammals (and Amphibia) by a double, condyle at the back of the head. In the former the lower jaw is composed of several pieces, and connected with the skull so that it can move by a special maxillary bone (the quadratum); in the Mammals ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel

... chamber (c). The total length is nearly 80 feet. Another tomb of the same type, La Grotte du Castellet, contained over a hundred skeletons, together with thirty-three flint arrow or spear-heads, one of which was stuck fast in a human vertebra, a bell-shaped cup, axes of polished stone, beads and pendants of various materials, 114 pieces of callais, and a small ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet

... I hope he cooks better than he paints." And sliding down in his chair until he rested upon a more comfortable vertebra, the elegant Barney lit a monogrammed cigarette, and with idle ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott

... the tongue, the "hump-ribs" (the long spinous processes of the first dorsal vertebra), and the marrow of the shank bones. "Boudins" (part of the intestines) are also favourite "tit-bits" among ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... qualities as animals of draught. Being desirous of ascertaining whether these dogs are wolves in a state of domestication, a question which we understood to have been the subject of some speculation, Mr. Skeoch, at my request, made a skeleton of each, when the number of all the vertebra was found to be the same in both, and to correspond with the well-known anatomy of ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... nature, does cutting off the sap tend to produce flower-buds? I know it does in trees in orchards. Owen has been doing some grand work in the morphology of the vertebrata: your arm and hand are parts of your head, or rather the processes (i.e. modified ribs) of the occipital vertebra! He gave me a grand lecture on a cod's head. By the way, would it not strike you as monstrous, if in speaking of the minute and lessening jaws, palpi, etc., of an insect or crustacean, any one were to say they were produced by the affaiblissement ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin



Words linked to "Vertebra" :   coccygeal vertebra, thoracic vertebra, atlas vertebra, backbone, spine, spinal column, os, axis vertebra, dorsal vertebra, vertebral, bone, caudal vertebra, rachis, vertebral column, lumbar vertebra, centrum



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