"Excrescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the ideal of life held, considers that objectively we must incline to an unfavorable estimate "Even a brief passion is a rupture in the normal life; it is an abnormal, if not a pathological state, an excrescence, a parasitism." ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the highest degree the author's power of drawing 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 of the author's habit of building up her characters almost ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... be reformed by abolishing it altogether. There would appear to be no good reason for using two alphabets, now one and now the other, according to arbitrary rules, difficult to learn and hard to remember. That the general legibility of books would benefit by doing away with this mediaeval excrescence appears to admit of no doubt, although the proposal may seem somewhat ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... 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
... the greatest blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest blessings a people, my Lords, can enjoy, is liberty; but every good in this life has its alloy of evil; licentiousness is the alloy of liberty; it is an ebullition, an excrescence—it is a speck upon the eye of the political body: but which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a trembling hand, lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye upon which it is apt ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... 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 ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... 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
... 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, Sat. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... in the development of the embryon produce all degrees of deviation from the typical human form. Excessive development may result in an extra finger or toe, or in the production of some peculiar excrescence. Deficiency of development may produce all degrees of abnormality from the simple harelip to the most frightful deficiency, as the absence of a limb, or even of a head. It is in this manner that those unfortunate individuals known as hermaphrodites are formed. An excessive ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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 identified ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... I had no hope of success. When I heard that the weapon Brahmashira (discharged by Aswatthaman) was repelled by Arjuna with another weapon over which he had pronounced the word "Sasti" and that Aswatthaman had to give up the jewel-like excrescence on his head, then, O Sanjaya, I had no hope of success. When I heard that upon the embryo in the womb of Virata's daughter being wounded by Aswatthaman with a mighty weapon, Dwaipayana and Krishna pronounced curses on him, then, O Sanjaya, I had ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... 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 Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... excessive and almost absurd tameness of a fine Mutum or Curassow turkey, that ran about the house. It was a large glossy-black species (the Mitu tuberosa), having an orange- coloured beak, surmounted by a bean-shaped excrescence of the same hue. It seemed to consider itself as one of the family: attending all the meals, passing from one person to another round the mat to be fed, and rubbing the sides of its head in a coaxing way against their cheeks or shoulders. At night it went to roost on a chest in a sleeping-room ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... on the 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 across ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... divesting himself of his boots, and choosing one of the largest stems he could distinguish, he prepared to mount an old blue gum, whose trunk rose for fully forty feet smooth and straight, and without an impediment or excrescence. Putting his supple vine-stalk round the tree, and firmly grasping each end of the cane by his hands, he placed his feet firmly against the stalwart denizen of the woods, and rose in bounding starts with a celerity astonishing to the uninitiated. Upon reaching the fork of the tree, and ascending ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... The curious excrescence on the bill of the drake nukta or comb-duck is now much enlarged. This betokens the approach of the ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... individual Emperors, the Empire had been a Confucian institution. A body of official and literary opinion always strong and often overwhelmingly strong regarded imperial patronage of Buddhism or Taoism as a concession to the whims of the people, as an excrescence on the Son of Heaven's proper faith or even a perversion of it. But the Mongol Court had not this prejudice and Khubilai, like other members of his house[679] and like Akbar in India, was the patron of all the religions ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... shareholder in the 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 ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... attitude of the learned of those days 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 of truth to match—a system founded upon Aristotle—and so interwoven ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their residence for such a series of years, that the oak was distinguished by the title of the Raven-tree. Many were the attempts of the neighbouring ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... sympathetic magic. Action-at-a-distance by one object upon another. Homeopathic magic: the principle that things which resemble one another will interact. For instance, there's an animal the natives call a shynph. It has an excrescence of horn on its brow like an arrowhead, and it arches its back like a bow when it jumps. Therefore, a shynph is equal to a bow and arrow, and for that reason the Kwanns made their bowstrings out of shynph-gut. Now they use tensilon because it won't break as easily or get wet and stretch. So ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... themselves on the old Mongol site, population seems to have gathered close about the southern wall, probably using material from the remains of Yenking. This excrescence was inclosed by a new wall in 1554, and was called the "Outer Town." It is what is called by Europeans the Chinese City. Its western wall exhibits in the base sculptured stones, which seem to have belonged to the old palace of Yenking. Some traces of Yenking still existed ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 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 ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... a very wondrous likeness to a bird; so much so that I went up to it, to see if my eyes had deceived me. Yet it seemed no more than a freak of nature, though most wondrous in its fidelity; being but an excrescence upon the trunk. With a sudden thought that it would make me a curio, I reached up to see whether I could break it away from the tree; but it was above my reach, so that I had to leave it. Yet, one thing I discovered; for, in stretching towards the protuberance, I had placed ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... 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
... take the worst at once, and have done with it) needs the pen of a Swift before adequate justice can be done to his enormities. He is a blot, an excrescence. All those moments which are not spent in avoiding games (by means of that leave which is unanimously considered the peculiar property of the French nation) he uses in concocting ingenious excuses. Armed with these, he faces with calmness the disgusting curiosity ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... has written 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? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... cutting off of heads. If it refers to the past, you and I are cutting off the worker's head, severing from a fine muscular body a noble head with a halo to it. If it refers to the future, the worker is having our heads off, severing from a fat and uncontrolled corpus a most unpleasant excrescence in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,) who were at length 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 worn, and that his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... narrow, contracted, pinched, occasional system will be at all suitable to such an object. It will show you that it is not to be considered as one of those minima which are out of the eye and consideration of the law; not a paltry excrescence of the state; not a mean dependent, who may be neglected with little damage and provoked with little danger. It will prove that some degree of care and caution is required in the handling such an object; it will show that you ought not, in reason, to trifle with so large a mass of ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... 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 to banish this girl from his own neighborhood; ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... but I understand that warts are often produced by the distemper; and that one upon your nose seems to have taken possession of the very keystone of the bridge, which I hope is in no danger of falling.' L—n seemed a little confounded at this remark, and assured him it was nothing but a common excrescence of the cuticula, but that the bones were all sound below; for the truth of this assertion he appealed to the touch, desiring he would feel the part. My uncle said it was a matter of such delicacy to meddle with ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... a very difficult and responsible task to determine what to retain and what to discard. This, to a large extent, must depend upon what part the ornament plays in the melody of the composition, whether it is really an integral part or an artificial excrescence. By all means never discard any embellishment which may serve to emphasize the melodic curve, or any one which may add to its declamatory character. A well-educated taste assisted by experience will be ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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 like ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... 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
... his money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • 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 ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... taken much 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 at last down to ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... need not blame Gerard when he boldly said that "this excrescence hath not any roote, neither doth encrease himselfe of his seed, as some have supposed, but it rather commethe of a certaine moisture gathered together upon the boughes and joints of the trees, through the barke whereof this vaporous moisture proceeding bringeth forth the Misseltoe." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... candid, the critic was able to bring together an anthology of quotations which seemed like a rather forcible indictment of Schiller's literary taste. What Moritz failed to see was that the bad taste was only an excrescence growing upon a very vigorous stock. This was felt by another reviewer who declared that high poetic genius shone forth from every scene of Schiller's works. Many years later Zelter, the friend of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... questions as it became more apparent that these could not affect the freedom and security which, coupled with the natural advantages of the country, afforded the fullest scope and strongest stimulant to industrial activity. The extinction of slavery was the cutting away of an excrescence: the wound under a proper treatment was sure to heal, and even under unwise treatment Nature has been doing her work until only a scar remains. Painful, too, as was the operation, its success has given the clearest proof of the health and vigor of our system, thus increasing the tendency ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this theatre of hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate land, some exhausted civilisation, not to this field of vigour where life ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... morning at nine o'clock showed little of its usual activity. Most of the boys were gathered near Sam Brierly's Gothic portico, now in unpicturesque ruins and hanging limply to the school front like an excrescence. Here Richard Haddon and Edward McKnight were standing in attitudes of extreme unconcern, heroes and objects of respectful admiration, but nevertheless inwardly ill at ease and possessed with sore misgivings. Some of their mates were offering ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... we 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 ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... terrific charms upon her three hundred Gods, upon Erebus, chaos, and the three-faced Hecate. She sprinkles around the waters of Avernus, and adds certain herbs that had been cropped by moonlight with a sickle of brass. She brings with her the excrescence which is found upon the forehead of a new-cast foal, of the size of a dried fig, and which unless first eaten by the mare, the mother never admits her young to the nourishment of her milk. After these preparations, Dido, with garments tucked up, and with one foot bare, approached ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... taken out of Adam's side, 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, the woman ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... upon the hands, of liberty. One of the greatest blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest blessings a people can enjoy, is liberty. But every good in this life has its allay of evil. Licentiousness is the allay of liberty. It is an ebullition, an excrescence; it is a speck upon the eye of the political body, which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a trembling hand; lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye, upon which it is apt to appear. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... adequate, though sometimes inelegant, it may be urged that Logic has nothing to do with elegance; or that, at any rate, the chief elegance of science is economy, and that therefore, for scientific purposes, whatever we may write further about conditionals must be an ugly excrescence. The scientific purpose of Logic is to assign the conditions of proof. Can we, then, in the conditional form prove anything that cannot be proved in the categorical? Or does a conditional require to be itself proved by any method not applicable to the Categorical? ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... for the credit of America, should be left unsaid, perhaps; but these very things happen sometimes to be the very things which, for the real benefit of Americans, ought to have prominent notice. While we stood looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind, appeared on the jaw of the Sphynx. We heard the familiar clink of a hammer, and understood the case at once. One of our well meaning reptiles—I mean relic-hunters—had crawled up there and was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the great storehouse of natural delights there is no money taken and no price on the goods. Mr. Rockefeller's L100 a minute (if that is his income) is poor consolation for his bad digestion, and the late Mr. Pierpoint Morgan would probably have parted with half his millions to get rid of the excrescence that made his nose an unsightly joke. We cannot count our riches at the bank—even on the material side, much less on the spiritual. As I came along the village this morning I saw Jim Squire digging up his potatoes ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... 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 church of Clapton-in-Gordano, Somerset, is entered by an arch ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... mountain. The sitting bird was disturbed as I passed beneath her. The whirring of her wings arrested my attention, when, after a short pause, I had the good luck to see, through an opening in the leaves, the bird return to her nest, which appeared like a mere wart or excrescence on a small branch. The humming-bird, unlike all others, does not alight upon the nest, but flies into it. She enters it as quick as a flash, but as light as any feather. Two eggs are the complement. They are perfectly white, and so frail that only a woman's fingers ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... strongly the unworthiness of the existence to which she was condemned. That contemptible review, and now her father's ignoble passion—such things were enough to make all literature appear a morbid excrescence upon ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of what the world calls threatening, or what Ahab called' prophesying evil.' I beseech you, do not be carried away by the modern talk about Christianity being gloomy and dark, or fancy that we put a blot and an excrescence upon the pure religion of the Man of Nazareth, when we speak of the death that follows sin, and of the darkness into which unbelief ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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|!, pot belly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... craft, and by diligent use of a telescope, Metcalf found his quarry three days later—a log-like object on the horizon, with the slim white pole amidships and the excrescence near ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... a part of the edifice that the ancients always endeavored to conceal, it being an excrescence in architecture that was only to be tolerated on account of its usefulness. Besides, as he wittily added, a chief merit in a dwelling was to present a front on whichever side it might happen to be seen; for, as it was exposed to all eyes in all weathers, there should be no weak flank for ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... cluster about the walls and fill up the moat, yet the walls will stand; so in all the conflicts that befall God's church and God's truth, the calming thought ought to be ours that if anything perishes it is a sign that it is not His, but man's excrescence on His building. Whatever is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... myrtle-trees, which are the largest on the island, and supplied us with all the timber we used; yet even these would not work to a greater length than forty feet. The top of the myrtle is circular, and as uniform and regular as if clipped round by art. It bears an excrescence like moss on its bark, having the taste and smell of garlic, and was used instead of it by our people. We found here the pimento, and the cabbage-tree, but in no great quantity. Besides these, there were a great number of plants of various kinds, which we were not botanists enough ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... rounded process or excrescence on a margin: specifically, the rounded, tooth-like processes on the margin of the pygidium of the Diaspinae: also applied to lateral ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... 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
... "Surgical Observations on Tumors," observes that cancer of the penis begins by a warty excrescence on the glans or prepuce. Walshe, in his work on the "Nature and Treatment of Cancer," says: "The disease may commence in almost all parts of the organ, but the glans and prepuce are by far its most common primary seats. It may originate either from ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... 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 ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... peas touch laterally, and are pressed one against the other, so that the grub, when searching for a point of attack, cannot circulate at will. Let us also note that the lower pole expands into the umbilical excrescence, which is less easy of perforation than those parts protected by the skin alone. It is even possible that the umbilicum, whose organization differs from that of the rest of the pea, contains a peculiar sap that is distasteful to the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... be more recent (having perhaps replaced others) than their neighbours, which are obliterated to the extent of being lions or lionesses only by guesswork. These nameless feline creatures hold what appear to be portions of sheep, one of them having at its flank a curious excrescence like the stinging scorpion of the Mithra groups. The griffins, on the other hand, although every detail is rubbed out, are splendid in power and expression—great lion-bodied creatures, with gigantic eagle's beak, manifestly birds rather than beasts, with the muscular neck ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... ear stood erect upon her head, while the other, mangled and torn into a serried red excrescence, formed the termination of a broad, ragged scar which began at the corner of her mouth, giving her face the expression of a fiendish grin that belied the green glare of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... part of a sense of humour, as you know without my telling you, consists in a sense of proportion; a habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human, affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally a humour: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to prick these humours. I will but refer you to Meredith's ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... before, sir; must have annoyed you dreadful!" remarked the commiserating barber, as he passed the preparatory scissors round his customer's jaw, mowing the great golden sheaf at one sweep. He spoke of it as though it were a cancer or other painful excrescence, the removal of which would be to the sufferer a ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... them, fearing lest they might contain some truth beyond the range of our limited experience. But, having come to see wherein the essence of Christian truth lies in all varieties of pious experience, we know that this doctrine is an excrescence, weakening always the vital power of the gospel. It rests on custom, on cowardice, on the fear of change, not on any positive insight or substantial knowledge. But, as Tertullian declared of another doctrine defended by precedent, "Christ did not say, 'I am ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... performers, we will venture to relate. It will be recollected that at the dinner table at Colonel D'Egville's on the day of the capture of Major Montgomerie, and his party, among the guests were the chiefs Split-log and Walk-in-the-Water, the former distinguished by a huge bulbous excrescence miscalled a nose, and exquisitely slit ears that dangled gracefully upon his shoulders, at every movement of his Memnon-like head: the latter by his striking resemblance to the puritans of the days of the Commonwealth. Now it ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... courtesy, 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, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... don't think enough is effected for the enormous sums expended, though it is a fine and will be a good house; still, how far (as a palace) from Versailles, St. Cloud, and the other palaces in France! The external terrace has spoilt the old one, and is altogether a frightful excrescence, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... 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 ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 cross, presented to Sens by Charlemagne. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... excitement. How could Creno be wrong? He knew everything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now were living things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence at one end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of willed effort as they crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching grasping feelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easing legs as the food spread ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... essentially 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 ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... a mile distant. The meeting was held in a little chapel built out like an architectural excrescence at the side of the great, oblong, wooden structure, with its piercing steeple. The chapel windows blazed with light. People were flocking in. As they entered, a young lady began to play on an out-of-tune piano, which Judge Josiah Saunders had presented to the church. She played a Moody-and-Sankey ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... are rather grand—quite out of our beat; and in parish work I am only an estimable excrescence. It is very well that I am not wanted, for Miss Headworth requires a good deal of attention, and it is only the old Adam that regrets the days of importance. Ah, ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a process, I discern no end. Cutting off one excrescence to see two; There is 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... its back, just over the shoulder. At first he could not make out what this was, as he had never heard of such a protuberance, besides, the tail half hid it from his view. All of a sudden the animal turned its head backwards, touched the hunch with its snout, gave itself a shake, and then the odd excrescence fell to the ground, and proved to be a young ant-eater, with bushy tail and long snout, the "very image of its mother." The large one was thus seen to be a female that had been carrying her infant ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... 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 masks, but ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... us at last and motioned us to follow him. He led us to the rear of the chapel, where, plastered against the wall, was a semicircular excrescence,—a tiny cell, with a narrow door hewn from a single plank and fastened with a heavy padlock. Drawing forth a key from his belt he unlocked this and bade us enter. We did so, and he closed ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... minutes they stood eyeing each other. The elephant, although much the larger, knew his antagonist well. He had met his "sort" before, and knew better than to despise his powers. Perhaps, ere now, he had had a touch of that long spit-like excrescence that stood out from the ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... as something like an excrescence on the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and grotesque. Fairies and satyrs are picturesque; but they are scarcely ideal. They are an extreme and unique conception of a certain thing, but not of what the mind delights in or broods ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... whole system of industrial and agricultural development; and he was bound in return to perform arduous and complicated duties. How far he performed them well is another question. At least, he did whatever was done in the way of governing, and therefore did not sink into a mere excrescence or superfluity. I must try to point out certain results which had a material effect upon English opinion in general and, in particular, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... tall fig tree—flourishing in one of the corners, its dense, wide branching top making a literal roof for the otherwise roofless hall—an enormous ant's nest was plastered, a black excrescence looking like burnt paper, and which crumbled like soft crisp cinder as I poked it with the barrel of my gun, to the dismay of its myriad little red inhabitants—the only denizens it would seem ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... knowledge, the question almost inevitably occurs to us: Is not this decay and death of competition, this attempt to suppress it under certain conditions, too wide and general a movement to be treated as merely a troublesome excrescence? Is it not likely that there are certain fixed laws regarding competition which determine its action and operation, and sometimes its death? If this be so, it is of the highest importance that we find and study these laws; and ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... Colonial governors causes him to place the administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern colony grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town, instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... sporting two to one, Jeeves, judging from what you have seen of him, that this chappie is not a blighter or an excrescence?" ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... by a sallow-faced, red-haired, sulky boy, who, after surveying Mr. Gabriel Parsons through the glass, applied a large key to an immense wooden excrescence, which was in reality a lock, but which, taken in conjunction with the iron nails with which the panels were studded, gave the door the appearance of being subject ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd, and, finest of all, the Comus of Milton. They are the most matchless frames of language in which sweet thoughts and fancies were ever set. After all, before this higher beauty, royal pomp even seems only a coarse excrescence, and all would be better if the accessories of the rendering were very simple. Already in my mind is the grove for Comus designed; the mass of green which shall stand in the centre, the blasted trunk that shall rise for contrast to one side, and the vine that shall half conceal ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... distance of desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty. Her noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too late her presence, froze to the dead stump—a ruffled gray excrescence with glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live thing in ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... It went deeper than that. It included many who in 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
... "modest merit," and the power of gold over the sex. As a remembrance of his passion, he pointed out a heart carved on the bark of one of the trees; but which, in the process of time, had grown out into a large excrescence; and he showed me a lock of her hair, which he wore in a true-lover's knot, in ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... 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
... might always be suited to the means of the wearer. They would admit of any kind of ornament that would not destroy their principle of utility;—for ornament ceases to be ornament when it negatives the purpose of the object to which it is applied—it becomes in such a case a mere excrescence: they might be edged and lined with any, the most sumptuous or the plainest materials: they might be attached round the neck by rich cords of gold and jewelled clasps; or they might be fastened with simple ribands. Thus, in spring time, a young and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... 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 Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... David had seen what was before him, Tom waited for a few moments, with the dark excrescence still gradually growing, till he could contain himself no longer, and reaching this time with his stick, he gave the gardener a pretty good poke, when the return pressure told him that this time his companion was ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... kinds of polypi—first, the soft, vascular and bleeding polypus, usually produced from the fibro-cartilaginous structure of the outer half of the tube; and, secondly, the hard and cartilaginous polypus or excrescence produced from the lining membrane of its inner half. The first is termed the haematoid polypus, and the other the chondromatous. The dog suffering under either generally has a dull, heavy, and rather watery eye. He moans or whines at intervals. If ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... is the fashion with certain critics (especially with those who have read it superficially) to speak of the Second Part of Goethe's Faust, as they do of Paradise Regained, with a certain superciliousness, as a superfluous excrescence, the artistically almost worthless product of a mind that had worked itself out and had exhausted ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... proof that man existed within the mass of her 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. But, to the understanding eye of Wilder, she exhibited a very different spectacle. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... pantomime. When my rehearsal was over, the carriage not being come, I went down to see what they were doing. There was poor Farleigh, nose and all (a worthy, amiable man, and excellent comic character, with a huge excrescence of a nose), qui se demenait like one frantic; huge Mr. Stansbury, with a fiddle in his hand, dancing, singing, prompting, and swearing; the whole corps de ballet attitudinizing in muddy shoes and poke-bonnets, and the columbine, in dirty stockings and a mob-cap, ogling the harlequin in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... convince them without effort of my superior usefulness; there was no time to lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth. Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn. That my human heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... profession, 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
... security I stood and surveyed the scene beneath and around me. The angle of vision did not, it is true, embrace objects immediately below me, owing to the projecting cornices of the flat roof (a mere excrescence from the original structure, as this was), but beyond this the eye swept ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... vulgarly called blubbering, his fine new waistcoat sprinkled with his own blood, which flowed from his nose,—nose that seemed to Lenny Fairfield's feelings to be a nose no more, but a swollen, gigantic, mountainous Slawkenbergian excrescence; in fact, he felt all nose! Turning aghast from this spectacle, Mr. Stirn surveyed, with no more respect than Lenny had manifested, the stranger boy, who had again seated himself on the stocks (whether to recover his breath, or whether to show that his victory was ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... contempt for Joseph's flunkeyism. Hitherto he had had the theory that footmen, valets and all male personal attendants were an inexcusable excrescence on the social fabric. The mere sight of them often angered him, though for some reason he had no objection whatever to servility in a nice-looking maid—indeed, rather enjoyed it. But now, in the person ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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
... overlooking us had the black gloss of empty darkness within. Seen by starlight 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 dead ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... extricate his foot only draw it 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 ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... in, and then, being shoved forward by the flat woman, she thanked us sweetly, and said we were good fellows, and that she was sorry for some things she'd said to us. Then she retired, fluttering and very much flushed, and hid herself behind the hard woman—who, by the way, had an excrescence on her upper lip which might ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... for carrying water for short distances, or for storing it in camp, may be made of the bark of a tree, either taken off in an entire cylinder, and having a bottom fitted on, or else of a knot or excrescence that has been cut off the outside of a tree, and its woody interior scooped out; or of birth bark sewed or pegged at the corners, and having its seams coated with the gum or resin of the pine-tree. Baskets with oiled ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... used these words: "That this place was to the King as my Lord Carnarvon [Charles Dormer succeeded his father, who fell at the battle of Newbury; as Earl of Carnarvon. Ob. s.p. 1709.] says of wood, that it is an excrescence of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts. "This day Sir W. Coventry tells me the Dutch fleet shot some shot, four or five hundred, into Burnt Island in the Frith, but without any ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... wart, or gland-like excrescence, is seen while transplanting, throw all such plants away, unless your supply is short; in such case, carefully trim off all the diseased portions with a sharp knife. If the disease is in the growing crop, it will be made evident by the drooping of the ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... of syndicalism teems with attacks on democracy. "Syndicalism and Democracy," says Emile Pouget, "are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.... Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external excrescence, while syndicalism is the logical manifestation of a growth of life, it is a rational cohesion of human beings, and that is why, instead of restraining their individuality, it prolongs and develops it."[37] Democracy is, in ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... reason when ordinary people, not born 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
... he will quietly, with Eastern philosophy, await his end. He knows that the four winds will bring drifting sand to the spot where his body lies; it will gather and gather, as it does against any excrescence, until his body is well covered. In the desert many are the ships that pass in ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Burgos, throwing it into tracery altogether: but to do this is invariably the sign of a vicious style, as it takes away from the spire its character of a true roof, and turns it nearly into an ornamental excrescence. At Antwerp and Brussels, the celebrated towers (one, observe, ecclesiastical, being the tower of the cathedral, and the other secular), are formed by successions of diminishing towers, set one above the other, and each supported by buttresses thrown to the angles of the one beneath. At the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... such as is found in desks and very cheap articles, works on the principle shown in Fig. 212. The bolt is split at the rear, and the upper part bent upwards to form a spring. The under edge has two notches cut in it, separated by a curved excrescence. The key merely presses the bolt upwards against the spring, until the notch, engaging with the frame, moves it backwards or forwards until the spring drives the tail down into the other notch. This primitive ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... gradual emancipation, 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 ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... or any thing else bought in an open and legal market; but according to the obligation of being not repugnant to the laws of England, I do not see how we can have any title to our slaves likely to be supported by the laws of England." In fact, the Colonial system is an excrescence upon the English Constitution, and is constantly at variance with it. There is not one English law, which gives a man a right to the liberty of any of his fellow creatures. Of course there cannot be, according to charters, any ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... the root from which the whole springs, and the branches may be arranged as present opinion or future experience shall best direct. As to that hospital of incurables (as Chesterfield calls it), the British house of peers, it is an excrescence growing out of corruption; and there is no more affinity or resemblance between any of the branches of a legislative body originating from the right of the people, and the aforesaid house of peers, than between ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... fifty Pippins; quarter and core them, without paring them: for the paring is the Cordialest part of them. Therefore onely wipe or wash them well, and pick away the black excrescence at the top; and be sure to leave out all the seeds, which are hot. You may cut them (after all the superfluities are taken away) into thinner slices, if you please. Put three Gallons of Fountain water to them in a great Pipkin, and let them boil, till the Apples become clear ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... certainly not effeminate; but they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is masculine, in his sturdy contempt for the arts of peace; whereas to Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the community, a disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a rational ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... their grandfather 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 ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... selves that no such Excrescence will appear in the Family of the Cornelii, where the Father lives with his Sons like their eldest Brother, and the Sons converse with him as if they did it for no other Reason but that he is the wisest Man of their Acquaintance. As the Cornelii are eminent Traders, their good Correspondence ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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 the walls, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... be valid. For it is surely an error to judge and to condemn the latinisms without reference to the whole style of which they form a necessary part. Mr. Gosse, it is true, inclines to treat them as if they were a mere excrescence which could be cut off without difficulty, and might never have existed if Browne's views upon the English language had been a little different. Browne, he says, 'had come to the conclusion that classic words ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... 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 its aisles ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... Vine-Pits Farm, the home of Mr. Bates the 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 neglected, derived a great air of dignity from its ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... legs reposed together on the table. It must be added, however, that the old people live on good terms, and that Mrs Winklemann frequently visits Daddy, and smokes with him. The offshoot on the left, built by Michel, is a stable, and an excrescence beyond is a cow-house. There, are fowls in front of the hut, and flour, sugar, pork, and tea within, so it may be concluded that the ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 in the laws of Maryland or Virginia. I am of Mr. Bacon's ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... 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 on ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... excrescence on the flank of Mother Earth herself, the mound loomed; like an unhealthy, cancerous growth. And inside the enigmatic thing was another world. A dark world, mysterious, horrible, peopled by blind and terrible demons—a world like a Dante's ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst |
