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Epidermis   /ˌɛpədˈərməs/   Listen
Epidermis

noun
1.
The outer layer of the skin covering the exterior body surface of vertebrates.  Synonym: cuticle.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Epidermis" Quotes from Famous Books



... not achieved the maturity that comes with pairing-time. Even in this initial stage the word "worm" is out of place. We French have the expression "Naked as a worm" to point to the lack of any defensive covering. Now the Lampyris is clothed, that is to say, he wears an epidermis of some consistency; moreover, he is rather richly coloured: his body is dark brown all over, set off with pale pink on the thorax, especially on the lower surface. Finally, each segment is decked at the hinder edge with two spots of a fairly bright red. A costume like this ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... cultivation and selection of the ants. The fungus was found to belong to the genus Rozites, and the species was named R. gongylophora. A microscopic examination of the particles of which the garden is composed shows that they contain remains of leaves; bits of epidermis, stomata, spiral vessels, etc., ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... saccharine bodies; and, as these substances swell greatly in the fire, it is necessary to leave seven-eighths of the retort empty. It is of a yellow colour, verging to red, and leaves a mark upon the skin, which will not remove but alongst with the epidermis. It may be procured less coloured, by means of a second distillation, and is concentrated by freezing, as is directed for the citric acid. It is chiefly composed of water and oil slightly oxygenated, and is convertible into oxalic and malic acids by farther ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... nature to be impervious to the shame of mere detection. In Eastern countries the liar detected smiles in one's face. Detection is to an Oriental no punishment; something more tangible is required to pierce his mental epidermis. ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman

... up the points to which we have alluded, three sorts of scars now disfiguring Gothic architecture; wrinkles and warts upon the epidermis—these are the work of time; wounds, brutal injuries, bruises, and fractures—these are the work of revolution, from Luther to Mirabeau; mutilations, amputations, dislocations of the frame, "restorations,"— these are the Greek, Roman barbaric work of professors according ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... night. According to Professors Brown, Seidy and Gibbs, the negro's hair is not tubular, like the white man's, but it is eccentrically elliptical, with flattened edges, the coloring matter residing in the epidermis, and not in tubes. In the place of a tube, the shaft of each hair is surrounded with a scaly covering like sheep's wool, and, like wool, is capable of being felted. True hair does not possess that property. The degeneration called albinoism has ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... should be exercised to see that in the child's mind in any case there is clear connection between what he has done and the treatment that he receives. With some parents it fairly seems as if their one remedy for all offenses is a tingling in the epidermis—it is equally clear that with some teachers their one weapon is sarcasm. All too frequently these measures grow out of unsettled nerves or stirred up passions, on the part of the parent or teacher, and have really but little connection—remote at best—with ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion

... these details; for in any case the ultimate result is the same—viz. that of converting the Metazooen into the form of a tube, the walls of which are composed of concentric layers of cells. The outermost layer afterwards gives rise to the epidermis with its various appendages, and also to the central nervous system with its organs of special sense. The median layer gives rise to the voluntary muscles, bones, cartilages, &c., the nutritive systems of the blood, the chyle, the lymph, and ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... about 2 mm. in diameter. The appearance thus presented was curiously like that of a leaf, into which the larva of some minute insect had burrowed. But my son Francis, after making and examining sections, could nowhere find that the cell-walls had been broken down or that the epidermis had been penetrated. When the section passed through the whitish dots, the grains of chlorophyll were seen to be more or less discoloured, and some of the palisade and mesophyll cells contained nothing but broken down granular matter. ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... most remarkable characters of the genus Caecilia, which it shares with about two-thirds of the known genera of the order, is the presence of thin, cycloid, imbricate scales imbedded in the skin, a character only to be detected by raising the epidermis near the dermal folds, which more or less completely encircle the body. This feature, unique among living Batrachians, is probably directly inherited from the scaly Stegocephalia, a view which is further strengthened by the similarity of structure of these ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... May, the younger needle-like leaves of the Scotch pine are occasionally seen to have assumed a yellow tinge, and on closer examination this change in color, from green to yellow, is seen to be due to the development of what look like small orange colored vesicles standing off from the surface of the epidermis, and which have in fact burst through from the interior of the leaf (Fig. 31). Between these larger orange yellow vesicles the lens shows certain smaller brownish or almost black specks. Each of the vesicular ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various

... Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch. The other was Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana Valley. Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she railed at railroads and menaced men. Either would have given up his epidermis to make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the ostrich gives up his tip or the aigrette lays down its life. Neither possessed the ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad deficiency against the coming Sabbath. ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... your arm into a sleeve of moistened parchment which when set on fire would draw up and in a leisurely fashion reduce your flesh to dust. Or they would drive wedges into your thighs and split the bones. They would crush your thumbs in the thumbscrew. Or they would singe all the hair off your epidermis with a poker, or roll up the skin from your abdomen and leave you with a kind of apron. They would drag you at the cart's tail, give you the strappado, roast you, drench you with ignited alcohol, and through it all preserve an impassive countenance and tranquil nerves ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... a letter from New York." Still Cheetham kept his battery at work. After his "Narrative" came the "View," and then, in 1803, "Nine Letters on the Subject of Burr's Defection," a heavier volume, a sort of siege-gun, brought up to penetrate an epidermis heretofore apparently impregnable. Finally, the Albany Register took up the matter, followed by other Republican papers, until their purpose to drive the grandson of Jonathan Edwards from the party ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... veis esos cambiantes rojos de sus carnes morbidas y transparentes? ... ?No parece que por debajo de esa ligera epidermis azulada y suave de alabastro circula un fluido de luz de color de rosa? ... ?Quereis mas vida? ... ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his person in a fancy dress. He alone had his face turned toward the doorway, and fixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child stationed as a masquerading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant show, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... I miss when I am in Paris: it is the perpetual street-mending of an American town. Here the boulevards, smeared with asphaltum or bedded with crunched macadam, attain smoothness without life: you travel on scum. But in the dear old American streets the epidermis is vital: what strength and mutual reliance in the cobbles as they stand together in serried ranks, like so many eye-teeth! How they are perpetually sinking into prodigious ruts, along which the ponderous drays ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... our lawyers join in alleging as a reason for the severity of some of our enactments. When I come to treat of matters so mysterious, deep, and dangerous, as these circumstances have given rise to, the blood of each reader shall be curdled, and his epidermis crisped into goose skin.—But, hist!—here comes the landlord, with tidings, I suppose, that ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... coating unscratched and unbroken. The use of brushes and bristles of all sorts, therefore, should be chiefly restricted to the hair and the finger nails, as for every ounce of dirt that they take out of the skin, they do a pound of damage to it. They scrub off the delicate epidermis, as well as the natural oil in it, and leave it dry and irritated and ready to crack open. Then more dirt gets into the cracks just formed, and more scrubbing with bristles and hot water and soap is indulged in to get it out. This opens the cracks still further, and the next layer ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... representative. He knew, as well as I, that his poor average of happiness was fortuitous—that it hinged on the life of his master. At his death he might become the chattel of any human brute with a white epidermis and money enough to buy him; might be separated from wife, children, companions and past associations. Suggesting the practical wisdom involved in the biblical axiom that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof, I turned the conversation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... both the North and the South are dead shells of another perfectly camouflaged clam called ARCA. While alive, the shells are covered with hairy, brown or black epidermis and look like pebbles among tufts ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company

... after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... 6, B) formed by certain lines of the superficial cells growing up from the surface, and as the thallus increases in area continuing to divide so as to roof in the chamber. The layer forming the roof is called the "epidermis," and the small opening left leading into the chamber is bounded by a special ring of cells and forms the "stoma" or air-pore. In most species of Riccia the air-chambers are only narrow passages, but in the other Marchantiales ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... scurfy condition of the skin, with more or less of irritation. It is really a shedding of the scaly epidermis brought on by injudicious feeding or want of exercise as a primary cause. The dog, in cases of this kind, needs cooling medicines, such as small doses of the nitrate and chlorates of potash, perhaps less food. Bowels to be seen to by giving plenty of green ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... Does it become such a one to rave against the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization? Unaided by the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been, at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods of Ecclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like his Piet ancestors. Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvement and spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on the part of any nation or people? From people to people the original God- given ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... sped back down the years to a garden in France. Her name was Clothilde. We met in a manner outrageous to Gallic propriety, as I used to climb over the garden wall to the peril of my epidermis. We loved. We were parted by stern parents—not mine—and Clothilde was packed off to the good Sisters who had previously had care of her education. Now she is fat and happy, and the wife of a banker ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... use of the microscopic mandibles. Those two delicate spikes are incapable of chewing anything, but they may very well serve to pierce the epidermis with an aperture smaller than that made by the finest needle; and it is through this puncture that the Leucopsis sucks the juices of his prey. They are instruments made to perforate the bag of fat which slowly, without suffering any internal injury, is emptied through an opening repeated ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... by any accident they are prevented doing so, they infallibly die, because the old skin has grown so tough and hard that it hinders the increase in volume which is inseparable from the growth of the animal. The casting of the skin is induced by the formation on the surface of the inner epidermis, of a layer of very fine and equally distributed hairs, which evidently serve the purpose of mechanically raising the old skin by their rigidity and position. These hairs then may be designated as casting hairs. That they are destined and calculated for this ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... operation. The reader may judge for himself, at least so far as idea goes. "A greater degree of amusement (than what their music and dancing yield) seems to be derived by the women from the practice of tatooing, or, marking the body, by raising the epidermis from the cuticle; a custom that has been found to exist among most of the uncivilized nations inhibiting warm countries, and which probably owes its origin to a total want of mental resources, and of the employment of time. By slightly irritating, it conveys ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... took off a fine skin, in which the microscope showed me an epidermis, delicate, perfectly intact; a derma no less intact, with little papillae and, moreover, covered with a lot of fine human hairs. Each of these little hairs had its root imbedded in its follicle, and the follicle accompanied by ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... slender white grub, not thicker than a pin, from one fourth to three-eighths of an inch in length, with a small brown head, and six very short legs. It commences its attack in May or June, usually at some distance from the stalk, towards which it eats its way beneath the epidermis, killing the root as fast as it proceeds. Late in July or early in August it transforms in the ground near the base of the hill, changing into a white pupa, about fifteen-hundredths of an inch long and ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... negro; nor was there any appearance of the Jewish rite. The lower right leg, foot, and toe-nails were well preserved; the left was a mere bone, wanting tarsus and metatarsus. The stomach was full of dried fragments of herbs (Ohenopodium, &c.), and the epidermis was easily reduced to powder. In this case, as in the other three, the mortuary skins were coarsely sewn with the hair inside: it is a mistake to say that the work was 'like ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... "you needn't back Epidermis to win to-day. I've only been here a month. But I'm ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan's Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... her drink, if she is troubled by too much humidity, he dries it; in order not to wound her, he works her almost without tools, with his hands; his plough merely scratches the telluric skin, which the inundation covers each year with a new epidermis. As you watch him going and coming upon that soaking ground, you feel that he is in his element. In his blue garment, which resembles a pontiff's robe, he presides over the marriage of earth and water, he unites the two principles which, warmed by the sun, give birth to life. Nowhere is this ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... footgear round his neck. Thorns, that in the "bush" will rip the best pair of British-made marching-boots to shreds in a very short time, trouble him hardly at all, for the soles of his feet, which with the palms of his hands are the only white parts of his epidermis, ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman

... serving only to distract attention from the real purpose of the work, which was to aim at moral elevation as well as at ideal beauty. Everything in the picture was to be equally dwelt upon; there was no sacrifice, no mystery. "These pictures," says Delacroix, "have no epidermis ...they lack the atmosphere, the lights, the reflections which blend into an harmonious whole, objects the ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... the poetry of color. Thus, in praising the modest blush which crimsons the cheek of beauty, we should destroy all its charm, if we attributed it to a sudden change in the reflecting surface of the epidermis,—a mere mechanical rushing of blood to the skin, and a corresponding change in its angle ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... called by the Tasmanian Fishery Commissioners the "Pearly Necklace Shell"; when deprived of its epidermis by acid or other means, it has a ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... greater daring in initiative, would doubtless be selected and encouraged, if I may say so, to go farther. It is possible that many famous recantations could be accounted for by this hypothesis. Galileo, for instance, probably had a sensitive epidermis which afforded an unlimited field for the exploitation of Spanish fleas, which formed, according to my theory, an indispensable item in the torture chest carried by the fraternity in Tuscany. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, I imagine to have been a XXXX dark-skinned heretic, tanned ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... normal conditions have reverted to pigmented skin and hair and eyes, so even the grown-ups have thrown back to civilization. Two or three years at the outside have put back the coloring matter in every newcomer's iris and epidermis. Just so—" ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... felt-like covering to the plant? The importance of protecting the delicate, sensitive, active cells from intense light, draught, or cold, have led various plants to various practices; none more common, however, than to develop hairs on the epidermis of their leaves, sometimes only enough to give it a downy appearance, sometimes to coat it with felt, as in this case, where the hairs branch and interlace. Fierce sunlight in the exposed dry situations where the mullein grows; prolonged drought, which often occurs ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... drops of carbolic acid, well stirred in to the arsenic water used upon skins of small mammals for mounting. This aids in preventing decay and slipping of the epidermis. ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray

... may be; but this stupidity wounds me, and it is not my intention to suffer such a stain on my family. The beauty of the face is a fragile ornament, a passing flower, a moment's brightness which only belongs to the epidermis; whereas that of the mind is lasting and solid. I have therefore been feeling about for the means of giving you the beauty which time cannot remove—of creating in you the love of knowledge, of insinuating solid learning into you; and the way I have at last determined upon is to unite you to ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)



Words linked to "Epidermis" :   pallium, epidermic, stratum germinativum, stratum basale, tegument, cutis, malpighian layer, cuticle, epidermal, epidermal cell, stratum, horny layer, stratum corneum, corneum, stratum granulosum, stratum lucidum, mantle, skin, rete Malpighii



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