"Excrescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... emigration of wage-earners, the discouragement of industry under Governments indifferent to the administration of law and the development of national resources, have all contributed to the Dantean horrors of the Irish workhouse system. These poor people are an excrescence on the body of Ireland which good government, if it does not wholly remove, may reduce nearly to vanishing point. Hitherto the chief rewards and blessings of British administration in Ireland have gone to the hard voters and to the strong agitators. ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... agree with the view that criminals are executed because they are above the level of the average. For the most part they are the excrescence of society, just as perverted, though in a different manner, as are those criminal types whom you consider below the level of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... 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 who pay them, and the Chinese underlings ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... witty aphorisms 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
... 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 so happened that Messieurs Split-log ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... glance at her. He dared not often. She did not talk much, but he was rather pleased with that fact, although her voice was so sweet and gracious. Speech in a creature like that was not an essential. It might even be an excrescence upon a perfection. It did not occur to the dazed mind of her worshipper that Mrs. Ewing might have very simple and ordinary reasons for not talking—that she might be tired or ill, or preoccupied. But after a number of those stolen glances, ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... 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 ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... of a 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 of ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... put the King to this charge for no good in the world: and now a man going over that is a good soldier, but a debauched man, which the place need not to have. And so used these words: "That this place was to the King as my Lord Carnarvon says of wood, that it is an excrescence of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts." Thence away to Sir G. Carteret, whom I find taking physic. I staid talking with him but a little, and so home to church, and heard a dull sermon, and most of the best women ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... with his money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... 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 by degrees ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... cost 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... 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 design; for it ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... 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 of Wool. Waving the first, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... bough. The dark reddish color of the hair of his skin, dashed with blackish tints, harmonized and blended well with the hue of the bark, so that at a distance, to an unpracticed eye, he appeared like a huge excrescence on the tree, or a large butt of a branch that had lodged in ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... 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? If not, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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
... absence of the wart, and a bit of surgeon's plaster covering the spot. I laughed over his having undergone such a severe surgical operation, and he seemed to take it in good part, assuring me that HE was the surgeon who amputated the excrescence with a razor. Of course I thought nothing strange of it at ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... Eve was not 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 ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be private was discovered. Only the north-west corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... only of an unpopular cause, but of an essentially effeminate system. His opponents were 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
... was answered 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 ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... finished, looked the same from New Street; and the portico of the Society of Artists' rooms stood over the pavement then. With these exceptions I only know one more building that has not been pulled down, or so altered as to be unrecognisable. The exemption is the excrescence called Christ Church, which still disfigures the very finest site in the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... totally reckless as to the character of the allies which it brings to the aid of its cause. When the genuine spirit of liberty animates the body of a people to a thorough examination of their affairs, it leads to the excision of every excrescence which may have fastened itself upon any of the departments of the government, and restores the system to its pristine health and beauty. But the reign of an intolerant spirit of party amongst a free people seldom fails to result in a dangerous accession to the executive power introduced ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... Elma, "do you imagine for a moment that that excrescence at the back of your head is fashionable? I never ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... feature can be removed without impairing the unity and consistency of the design. You may have a very good, even an expressive, building with no ornament at all if you like, but you may not have misplaced ornament. That is only an excrescence on the design, not an ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... may acquire excessive strength, and an unnatural size, at the expense of the health of the whole body: I cannot think this desirable, either for the individual or for society.—The unfortunate people in certain mountains of Switzerland are, some of them, proud of the excrescence by which they are deformed. I have seen women vain of exhibiting mental deformities, which to me appeared no less disgusting. In the course of my life it has never been my good fortune to meet with a female whose mind, in strength, just proportion, and activity, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... priestess, with dishevelled hair, calls with 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, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... 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
... Wales. [W. Ridley, 'Kamilaroi,' p. 25, derives it from Kulu, seed, but it is just as likely from Kolle, water.—J. Mathew.] A hollowed knot of a tree, used as a seed vessel, or for holding water. The word is applied to the excrescence on the tree as well as to the vessel; a bush hand has been heard to speak of a ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... feathers, &c., but he had remained till now in ignorance of the tradition, which assigned to them a past existence as human beings. He knew that every thing which is not in the common order of things, even a tree singularly shaped, or presenting an unusual excrescence, a blade of grass twisted into an uncommon form, a berry or a stalk of maize growing to an unusual size, become, in the eyes of these wild and superstitious children of the forest, invested with supernatural interest; but he had supposed that it was the mere resemblance which ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... consequence has been the belief that if there were proper regulation of certain marriages, especially of the deaf and of others suffering from particular maladies, "deaf-mutism", which is looked upon as an excrescence upon society, would in the course of a short time be stamped out. An illustration of this conception is the following extract from the Handbook of the Child Welfare Exhibit held in New York in 1911 (p. 38): "Mating of the Unfit. 'The Law'. Marriages of cousins, ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... conjecture the latter, for Edward had of himself too much good taste to wish to intrude into any society. In the opinion of all the shire, no society had more reason to consider itself select than that which met at every full moon in the Hamley assembly-room, an excrescence built on to the principal inn in the town by the joint subscription of all the county families. Into those choice and mysterious precincts no towns person was ever allowed to enter; no professional man might ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 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 should ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Only the queer excrescence on its top moved, and that stirred vaguely. Star-shells floated overhead and bathed it in pitiless light. And it remained motionless.... Sergeant Walpole had a vague impression of colossal detonations taking place miles above ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... he opens the folding lips, the softness of which, yielding entry to any thing of a hard body, close round it, and oppose the sight; and feeling further, meets with, and wonder at, a soft fleshy excrescence, which, limber and relaxed after the late enjoyment, now grew, under the touch and examination of his fiery fingers, more and more stiff and considerable, till the titillating ardours of that so sensible ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... partial, 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 dependant, 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 ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... keeping what I must And leaving what I can—such points as this. I won't—that is, I can't throw one away. Supposing there's no truth in what I hold About the need of trial to man's faith, Still, when you bid me purify the same, To such a process I discern no end. Clearing off one excrescence to see two, 740 There's ever a next in size, now grown as big, That meets the knife: I cut and cut again! First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? Experimentalize on sacred things! I trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... continual drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half-fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull-neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... person he was of a good size, bald before, with blue eyes, and an aquiline nose; and his hands and feet were so distorted with the gout, that he could neither wear a shoe, nor turn over the leaves of a book, or so much as hold it. He had likewise an excrescence in his right side, which hung down to that degree, that it was with difficulty kept up by ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... which it can be arranged. The equal rights of the people is 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 a regular member of the human ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... 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 clever ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... family but not one of established and unimpeachable dignity. Hence the ex's, though they marry right and left, lead the other words to the altar and are never led thither themselves. Witness exclude, excommunicate, excrescence, excursion, exhale, exit, expel, expunge, expense, extirpate, extract; in no instance does ex fellow its connubial mate—it invariably precedes. The ports, on the other hand, are the peers of anybody. Some of them choose to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... 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 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... arguments as long as possible, and refrained from forcing events. If substantial independence of Parliament and the Ministry could be secured, he was willing to allow the King a vague or imaginary headship until in the course of years that excrescence should ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... inquiry, having for its object the discover of truth, but thrown for the purposes of obtaining that end into the form of a litigation between the prosecutor and the prisoner.'[91] On the other hand, in the French system, the jury is really an 'excrescence' introduced by an afterthought. Now, says Fitzjames, the 'inquisitorial theory' is 'beyond all question the true one.' A trial ought obviously to be a public inquiry into a matter of public interest. He holds, however, that the introduction of the continental machinery for the detection ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... 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 general style and appearance of dress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... practical applications of 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. ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... by step. Then she paused. The staircase had abruptly ended on the level of the study, now cut off from it by the new partition. She was in a stifling inclosure, formed by the walls, scarcely eighteen inches wide. It was made narrower by a singular excrescence on the old wall, which seemed to have been a bricked closet, now half destroyed and in ruins. She turned to descend, when a strange sound from Uncle Sylvester's room struck her ear. It was the sound of tapping on ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... herself, unless a great emotional impulse travels over the country. The same middle class which is envenomed by the gambling madness is also the heir of all the more vile habits which the aristocrats have abandoned. Drinking—conviviality I think they call it—is not merely an excrescence on the life of the middle class—it is the life; and work, thought, study, seemly conduct, are now the excrescences. Drink first, gambling second, lubricity third—those are the chief interests of the young men, and I cannot say that the interests ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... 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 ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... has received from whalemen the inelegant name of "stinker," none of them attempted to alight upon the body of the dead monster. This bird, however, somewhat like a small albatross, but of dirty-grey colour, and with a peculiar excrescence on his beak, boldly took his precarious place upon the carcase, and at once began to dig into the blubber. He did not seem to make much impression, but ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... the relics of St. Paulinus, which Gundulf, or, according to another account, Lanfranc, transported from the older church. In this prolongation we seem to have a germ of those that gave us afterwards the Lady Chapels of Lichfield, Westminster, Gloucester, and elsewhere. This small excrescence, chapel it can scarcely be called, probably did not rise very high, as room had to be left above it for the east window, which, with the clerestory, was needed to light the presbytery. The latter, like the choir of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... committed a crime against humanity and a worse crime against his own race. The father of this girl had been guilty of a sin against society for which others—for which he, George Tryon—must pay the penalty. As slaves, negroes were tolerable. As freemen, they were an excrescence, an alien element incapable of absorption into the body politic of white men. He would like to send them all back to the Africa from which their forefathers had come,—unwillingly enough, he would admit,—and he would like especially to banish this ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... this 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 youths to get at this eyry: the difficulty whetted their inclinations, and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... The curious excrescence on the bill of the drake nukta or comb-duck is now much enlarged. This betokens the approach of the nesting ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... of ascidia formed from the union of one or more leaves, there are others which seem to be the result of a peculiar excrescence or hypertrophy of the leaf. Such are some of the curious pitcher-like structures met with occasionally in the leaves of cabbages, lettuces, Aristolochia, &c. See Hypertrophy, cup-like ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Dowry has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind ultra-crepidarian—McCready's friend, Walker, very likely; but nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and might have been rendered very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an excrescence,—re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most purple piece in the whole web—the end of the fourth Act—and shouldered himself into toleration through the prejudices of the pit, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... 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
... gone on; and, with this 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 to that purpose we ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... foot on a car leaving a great city a young lady grabbed him by the coat-tail and cried: "Say, Mr. Asterisk, what are your views on a future life?" Not in the grand manner, all this; but, if you like, a sign of vitality and interest; a mere excrescence. But are not these excrescences symptoms of a fever lying within our modern civilisation, a febrility which is going to make achievement of great ends and great work more difficult? We Britons, as a breed, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... that Mine; that there were in the Concavity thirteen hundred Barrels of Powder; notwithstanding which, it made no great Noise without, whatever it might do inwardly; that only taking away what might be not improperly term'd an Excrescence in the Rock, the Heave on the Blast had render'd the Castle rather stronger on that Side than it was before, a Crevice or Crack which had often occasioned Apprehensions being thereby wholly clos'd ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... the glasses on his nose he subjected his bonds to a critical examination. Each rounded steel band ran unbroken except for the smooth, almost jointless hinge and the small lock which sat perched on the back of the wrist in a little rounded excrescence like a steel wart. In the flat center of each lock was a small keyhole and alongside of it a notched nub, the nub being sunk in a minute depression. On the inner side, underneath, the cuffs slid into themselves—two notches on each showing where the jaws might be tightened to fit a smaller ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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
... by the name of Jack River. The houses are ranged in the form of a square; none of them exceed one story in height, and most of them are whitewashed. The ground on which it stands is rocky; and a small garden, composed chiefly of sand, juts out from the stockades like a strange excrescence. A large, rugged mass of rocks rises up between the fort and Playgreen Lake, which stretches out to the horizon on the other side of them. On the top of these rocks stands a flagstaff, as a beacon to guide the traveller; for Norway House is so ingeniously hid ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... healthy, ruddy-cheeked man suddenly, without saying a word, took hold of my hand and pressed it against his forehead for a little while; then, all the time in silence, he carried it backward until my fingers touched a small excrescence on his back. Now was the chance to find out whatever ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... grim towers rise boldly without ornament or decoration of any kind, and are cowled by a peculiarly strange roofing. The triple porch is denuded of its decorative statues, and there is a rank Renaissance excrescence in the rear which is unseemly, but for all that, as a mediaeval religious monument of rank, it appeals to all quite as forcibly as the brilliantly florid cathedral at Beauvais, or the richly proud Amiens, its ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... 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 ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... disappoint any advocate of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed; time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... virgin cow and a moonbeam, that he must be black, with a white triangular spot on the forehead, the likeness of an eagle on his back, and on his side the crescent moon. There must be two kinds of hair on his tail, and on his tongue an excrescence in the form of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... as the unsubstantial mud dwellings have crumbled away, until they have gradually developed into mounds that rise like huge mole-hills above the plain, and on which the present houses are built. Near each village is a graveyard, also forming a mound-like excrescence on the dead level ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... wit was still a human being, and much more nearly related to us than an ancient Greek. Pope's style, when he is at his best, has the merit of being thoroughly alive; there are no dead masses of useless verbiage; every excrescence has been carefully pruned away; slovenly paraphrases and indistinct slurrings over of the meaning have disappeared. He corrected carefully and scrupulously, as his own statement implies, not with a view of transferring as large a portion as possible of his author's ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... said the Sage; "the first man went about with only one ear; the second man made himself remarkable with three—and the cut-off ear, although alive and successful, felt itself an excrescence." ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn
... Rising above the scaffold, which replaced a portion of the prison wall, the outlines of a gibbet were descried; and from the cross-beam there hung three ropes, terminating in nooses, just perceptible above the upper edge of the curtain which extended thence to the ground. The grim excrescence seemed to possess a horrible fascination for the multitude. Those in position to see it best stirred not from their post, but faced the fatal cross-tree, the motionless ropes, the empty platform, with an untiring, insatiable ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... 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 cloth inside, make efficient water-vessels; they are in use in France as firemen's ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... carved in the bark of the tree, with a whole day's toil, when he had first begun to muse about his exalted destiny. It might be accounted a rather singular coincidence, that the bark, just above the inscription, had put forth an excrescence, shaped not unlike a hand, with the forefinger pointing obliquely at the word of fate. Such, at least, was its appearance in ...
— The Threefold Destiny (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 below, and commanded a magnificent ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... heavy rain set in, and washed the sulphate of ammonia and guano, down into the ashes, and mutual decomposition took place, with more or less loss of ammonia. In addition to this loss of ammonia, these manures came up to the surface of the ground in the form of an excrescence, so hard that the plants could with difficulty ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... 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
... nothing? For, as I remarked at the outset, this is not merely an assimilated expression, or an unauthorized nominative, or a weakly-supported clause, or any such trifling thing. Although be it remarked in passing, I am not aware of a single such trifling excrescence which we are not able at once to detect and to remove. In other words, this is not at all a question, like the rest, about the genuine text of a passage. Our inquiry is of an essentially different kind, viz. Are these twelve consecutive verses Scripture ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... on Browne's latinisms can possibly 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 were ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... but it had 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, ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson |
