"Vertebra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is movable in all directions—flexion, extension, lateral flexion, and rotation around the long axis of the column. Flexion is accompanied by compression of the intervertebral discs, and by a slight forward movement of each vertebra on the one below it. This forward movement is checked by the tension of the ligamenta flava ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... stretched out at full length along it, its colour harmonising with the bark, so that it cannot be seen by its unwary prey moving near it. As the deer or vicuna passes below, it launches itself on the doomed creature, and, drawing back its neck with its powerful claws, breaks the vertebra, and instantly kills it. Darwin states that he has frequently seen skeletons of huanucus ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Note.—This short thick trunk varies slightly in its relations on the two sides of the body. As the aorta bifurcates on the left side of the body of the fourth lumbar vertebra, the common iliac of the right side would have a longer course to pursue than that on the left, if both ended at corresponding points. However, this is not always the case, as has been pointed out by Mr. Adams ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... of the vertebra, called the body, is round and spongy in its texture, like the extremity of the round bones. The processes are of a more dense character. The projections are so arranged that a tube, or canal, is formed immediately behind the bodies of the vertebrae, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... man extends only as far downwards as the last dorsal or first lumbar vertebra; but a thread-like structure (the filum terminale) runs down the axis of the sacral part of the spinal canal, and even along the back of the coccygeal bones. The upper part of this filament, as Prof. Turner informs me, is undoubtedly homologous with ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the lower part of the base of the skull, as well as the back of the head. It is a broad, curved bone, and rests on the topmost vertebra (atlas) of the backbone; its lower part is pierced by a large oval opening called the foramen magnum, through which the spinal cord passes from the brain ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... if we examine this structure in any of the existing hoofed animals, we find that the bony processes called zygapophyses, which belong to each of the constituent vertebrae, are so arranged that the anterior pair belonging to each vertebra interlocks with the posterior pair belonging to the next vertebra. In this way the whole series of vertebrae are connected together in the form of a chain, which, while admitting of considerable movement laterally, is everywhere ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Goethe placed the matter in Schroter's hands. Again the head was raised from its pillow and carried back to the dismal Kasselgewolbe, where the bones still lay in a heap. The chief difficulty was to find the first vertebra; after that all was easy enough. With some exceptions, comparatively trifling, Schroter succeeded in reproducing the skeleton, which then was laid in a new coffin 'lined with blue merino,' and would seem (though we are not distinctly told) to ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... destroyed by the fire; some with merely the clothes burnt off, leaving the naked body; some burnt to a deep brown tinge; others so far consumed that the viscera were exposed; while here and there the blackened ribs and vertebra were all that the fierce flames ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to examine the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had evidently retracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely, leaving the surfaces of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even; an appearance which could only have been produced by a heavy blow, inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last proof wanting to identify ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... days subsequent to the first finding, at a depth of twenty-four feet below the surface, other bones were found—a thigh-bone and a portion of the vertebra, and several pieces of charred wood, the bones apparently belonging to the first-found skeleton. In both cases the bones rested on a fibrous stratum, suspected at the time to be a fragment of coarse matting. This lay upon a floor of soft but solid iron-ore, which retained ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the forms are strangely complex and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,—the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus, the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... made a permanent trait by natural selection. Again, the modifications which follow use and disuse can by no possibility account for changes in the numbers of vertebrae; but after recognizing spontaneous, or rather fortuitous, variation as a factor, we can see that where an additional vertebra hence resulting (as in some pigeons) proves beneficial, survival of the fittest may make it a constant character; and there may, by further like additions, be produced extremely long strings of vertebrae, such as snakes show us. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... leads into a narrow rectangular chamber (c). The total length is nearly 80 feet. Another tomb of the same type, La Grotte du Castellet, contained over a hundred skeletons, together with thirty-three flint arrow or spear-heads, one of which was stuck fast in a human vertebra, a bell-shaped cup, axes of polished stone, beads and pendants of various materials, 114 pieces of callais, and a ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... The vertebra should be disjointed, and the ribs cut on the inside through the bone only, on the thin end. Place it on the platter with the back up and cut across from left to right, where the ribs were divided, separating the small ends of the ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... deviates slightly to the right, to allow room for the aorta. At the level of the second costal cartilage, the third in children, it bifurcates into the right and left main bronchi. Posteriorly the bifurcation corresponds to about the fourth or fifth thoracic vertebra, the trachea being elastic, and displaced by various movements. The endoscopic appearance of the trachea is that of a tube flattened on its posterior wall. In two locations it normally often assumes a more or less oval outline; in the cervical region, ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... Producing a pair of silver-mounted horse-pistols from a corner of the tent, and waving them theatrically about, he proclaims aloud his mighty devotion to the Shah. At nine o'clock Abdullah brings in the supper. The Khan's vertebra has become too limp and willowy to enable him to sit upright, and he has become too indifferent to such coarse, un-spiritual things as stewed chicken and musk-melons to care about eating any, while the moonshi bashi's affection for me on account of the map has become ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... persons. In southern Celebes the regalia often consist of corporeal portions of deceased rajahs, which are treasured as sacred relics and confer the right to the throne. Similarly among the Sakalavas of southern Madagascar a vertebra of the neck, a nail, and a lock of hair of a deceased king are placed in a crocodile's tooth and carefully kept along with the similar relics of his predecessors in a house set apart for the purpose. The possession of these relics constitutes ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Aldermaston, once a snake sanctuary. He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I had broken his back, but on picking him up I was pleased to find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre had not, like the brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra; he quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily away into cover. Twice only have I deliberately tried to run down, to tread on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild creature. One was a weasel, the other a stoat, running along at a hedge-side before me. In both ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson |
