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Epidermis   Listen
noun
Epidermis  n.  
1.
(Anat.) The outer, nonsensitive layer of the skin; cuticle; scarfskin. See Dermis.
2.
(Bot.) The outermost layer of the cells, which covers both surfaces of leaves, and also the surface of stems, when they are first formed. As stems grow old this layer is lost, and never replaced.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Epidermis" Quotes from Famous Books



... crawling pilferers, of course, by the water in which it grows. But suppose the pond dries up and the plant is left on dry ground, what then? Now, a remarkable thing happens: protective glandular, sticky hairs appear on the epidermis of the leaves and stems, which were perfectly smooth when the flowers grew in water. Such small wingless insects as might pilfer nectar without bringing to their hostess any pollen from other blossoms are held as fast as on bird-lime. The stem, which sometimes floats, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... did the scratching, we can prove it. Any good laboratory man can tell us whether the stuff that was under his nails contains particles of the human skin, the epidermis. If those particles are found, the case is settled, it seems ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.

... positions. Hence they have thick and succulent little stems and leaves, which merge into one another by imperceptible gradations. All parts of the plant alike are stumpy, green, and cylindrical. If you squash them with your finger and thumb you find that though the outer skin or epidermis is thick and firm, the inside is sticky, moist, and jelly-like. The reason for all this is plain; the stone-crops drink greedily by their roots whenever they get a chance, and store up the water so obtained ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... in the skin," he announced as if he was dictating a note for a medical journal, "and this is due, no doubt, to a deposit of the blue pigment in the deeper layers of the epidermis. The hair is at present unaffected save at the roots. God knows what colour blond hair will become. I am anxious about Leonora. The expression—I suppose I can regard myself as a typical case, Harden—is serene, if not animated. Subjectively, one may observe ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... surface yielding to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet from the ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... is a thin cuticle; this covers the epidermis, which consists of a syncytium with no cell limits. The syncytium is traversed by a series of branching tubules containing fluid and is controlled by a few wandering, amoeboid nuclei (fig. 2). Inside the syncytium is a not very regular layer of circular muscle fibres, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... but it is needless to go into 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, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... their search was completed I was stripped to the skin. But I was not permitted to re-dress. Evidently they concluded that I might have pockets in my epidermis because they went over me, inch by inch, resorting to actions which were wholly unnecessary and which were revolting, degrading, and demoralising to the last degree—such actions as one would hardly expect even from the lowest animals. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... slight the skin becomes pale and bloodless, followed soon after by intense redness, heat, pain, and swelling. In these cases the hair may fall out and the epidermis peel off, but the inflammation soon subsides, the swelling disappears, and only an increased ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... 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 ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... either floating, as in the blood, or fixed, like those in the cancellated structure of bone, already referred to. Very commonly they have undergone a change of figure, most frequently a flattening which reduces them to scales, as in the epidermis and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... not how she then learned that by the eyes can flow in a subtle essence, causing such powerful corrosions in all the veins of the body, recesses of the heart, nerves of the members, roots of the hair, perspiration of the substance, limbo of the brain, orifices of the epidermis, windings of the pluck, tubes of the hypochondriac and other channels which in her was suddenly dilated, heated, tickled, envenomed, clawed, harrowed, and disturbed, as if she had a basketful of needles in her inside. This was a maiden's desire, a well-conditioned desire, which troubled her ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... Dr. Martinot, is nothing more than inert matter, under the immediate control of physical laws which cause all liquid heated to a certain temperature to become steam; the epidermis is raised, the blister produced; it breaks with a little noise, and the steam escapes. But if, in spite of all appearances, there is any remnant of life, the organic mechanism continues to be governed by physiological laws, ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... of preventing mischief from such bites. "It is sufficient," he says, "to pour a few drops of tincture of cantharides on the wound, to cause a redness and vesiccation; not only is the poison rendered harmless, but the stings of the reptiles are removed with the epidermis that the bladder ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various

... function of the organs and characters involves special irritations or stimulations by external physical agents. Mechanical irritation, especially of the interrupted kind, repeated blows or friction causes hypertrophy of the epidermis and of superficial bone. I have stated this argument and the evidence for it in some detail in my volume on Sexual Dimorphism. It is one of the most striking facts in support of this argument that the ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... up to a saturation of sixty-six. I'm all right till it passes sixty-four. Yesterday afternoon it was only about sixty-one, and I felt fine. But after that it went up. I guess it must be a contraction of the epidermis pressing on some of ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... the edge of their mandibles cut out into five or six little teeth, which make an instrument admirably suited for scraping and removing the hairs from the epidermis of the plants. It is a sort of comb or teasel. The resin-kneading females have the edge of the mandible not toothed, but simply curved; the tip alone, preceded by a notch which is pretty clearly marked in some species, forms ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... Greenland. The operation, which by way of curiosity most of our gentlemen had practised on their arms, is very expeditiously managed by passing a needle and thread (the latter covered with lamp-black and oil) under the epidermis, according to a pattern previously marked out upon the skin. Several stitches being thus taken at once, the thumb is pressed upon the part while the thread is drawn through, by which means the colouring matter is retained, and a permanent dye of a blue tinge imparted to the skin. A woman ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... disdain. "The lower orders, my dear Evadne, are incapable of those delicate perceptions which constitute the mental atmosphere of those of finer mould. The delft does not feel the blow which would shiver the porcelain into atoms, and Reuben's epidermis is, I imagine, of such a horny consistency that he would walk in oblivious unconcern upon these elevations of needlework which are as a ploughshare to my sensitive nerves. It is the penalty one has to pay for being of finer clay than ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black

... by the methods of bathing in vogue, it will be necessary to first give the reader a brief account of the various processes undergone by the bather. The object of the profuse perspiration to be attained is twofold—(1) To cleanse the blood of impurities; and (2) to loosen the dead scales of the epidermis, or scarf-skin, that spreads itself everywhere over the true skin or cuticle. Besides this, however, physiologists tell us that the heat itself has a beneficial effect on the body in other ways, and is, in cases of disease, a most powerful curative and remedial agent. This latter fact ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop

... nursing a still younger bantling, now an empire twice as populous as Europe was at that period. Under the equally rugged hand of the young princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Russia was having her Mongolian epidermis indued with the varnish Napoleon so signally failed to scrape off, and was for the first time taking a place among the great powers of the West. The curtain, in short, was in the act of rising on the Europe of to-day. Anson had lately brought ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... After taking off his gloves, he rubbed his hands hard enough to take off their skin as well, if his epidermis had not been tanned and cured like Russia leather,—saving, of course, the perfume of larch-trees and incense. ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... doctor declared there was nothing contagious about it; at which neglect of scientific precaution Clem expressed justifiable disgust. For, indeed, he could have diagnosed the case completely himself, as a sore due to compulsory friction of the epidermis against an iron bedstead. But as science remained deaf to his protests, he hastened to get first pick of the regulation suits and shoes, and when fairly satisfied with the fit, he bit private marks on their various parts, helped to put on Looney's waistcoat wrong way before, split Alfred's ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... instance of a spider mimicking another spider. This may be accounted for by the fact that the specially protected spiders depend for their safety upon the possession of hard plates and spinous processes, and although the hardened epidermis might be imitated (we know that hard-shelled beetles are mimicked by others that are soft), spines could scarcely be imitated by a soft-bodied creature with ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... 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 swellings is a form of fungus fructification known as an cidium, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various

... constantly setting down the hatchways from the sails. What one would rather be without, though, is that tropical tinting known as the "prickly heat," which now begins to get troublesome; for, like boils, its spots generally select those parts of the epidermis where they are likely to become of the greatest nuisance, making the friction of garments almost intolerable; but there, one ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... of his head, in the small of his back, in his legs, little tracts of his epidermis tickled momentarily. He wiped his face, and walked boldly away from the clock to the portiere, which he lifted with one arm. Then he threw the light of his lamp direct on the dial, and glared at it again, fearful lest it should ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... injury arising from it. He next rubbed it over his hair and face, declaring that anybody might perform the same feat by first washing themselves in a mixture of spirits of sulphur and alum, which, by cauterising the epidermis, hardened the skin to ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... to cease. Any field that has remained untouched up to that time is considered to be quite secure from the moment the Holi has been committed to the flames. What gave rise to the notion I have never been able to discover, but such is the general belief. I suppose the siliceous epidermis must then have become too hard, and the pores in the stem too much closed up to admit of the further ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... it appears, recognised only two parts of the skin—the true skin, and the outer cuticle or epidermis. Malpighi discovered a third layer interposed between these, consisting of a sort of network, thence called rete mucosum, and believed to be the seat of colour in the negro. Albinus showed this to be a continuous layer, and not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... much practice; nevertheless it required all his skill to defend himself against an adversary who, active and energetic, departed every instant from received rules, attacking him on all sides at once, and yet parrying like a man who had the greatest respect for his own epidermis. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... ingeniously 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, stood close behind ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot



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



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