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Updated: June 15, 2025
In the course of a year or two the lesions increased in number, so that in four years the shoulder and arm were thickly studded with them. During the next five years no particular changes occurred either in lesions or in the degree of pain. The region affected simply looked like a solid sheet of variously-sized, closely-packed, confluent tubercles, hard and dense.
The stem produces offsets freely at the base, which grow into full-sized stems, and develop young ones, till a compact cushion is formed. Tubercles closely arranged, cylindrical, shining green, with fifteen to twenty radial, white, hair-like spines, ½ in. long, and three inner ones, which are thicker, purplish in colour, usually only one being hooked.
Cushions on raised points or tubercles, each consisting of a small tuft of hair, inclosed in a row of bristles, and one long, central spine, often exceeding 2 in. in length. When young, the spines are inclosed in a thin, bony sheath. Flowers scattered along the younger branches, 1 in. across, greenish-yellow, borne in June.
The upper part is clothed with the curved, leaf-like tubercles, from 3 in. to 6 in. long, grey-green in colour, succulent, with a tough skin, triangular, and gradually narrowed to a blunt point, upon which are half a dozen or more thin, flexuous, horny filaments, neither spines nor hairs in appearance, but almost hay-like; the central one is about 5 in. long, and the others about half that length.
The flowers, which usually appear in May, are arranged in a zone on the top of the old stems; sepals greenish-yellow, petals bright red. Fruit 1 in. long, pear-shaped, scarlet. Native of South Mexico, at high elevations. It may be grown outside in summer, and wintered in a heated greenhouse or frame. This is a singular-looking plant, the tubercles having an appearance suggestive of carving.
The stem is from 1 ft. to 1½ ft. high, 4 in. wide at the base, narrowing slightly upwards; the tubercles are 1 in. long, and nearly as much through at the base, their shape that of little pyramids, and their tips bear each from eight to eleven stout, straight spines, pale brown, with a little wool at the base.
Joints long and branch-like, with tufts of short, white hair on the apices of the tubercles, and one or two white, needle-like spines from ½ in. to 1 in. long. At the base of each tuft, from the apex to 1 ft. or more down the younger branches, there is a fleshy, green, awl-shaped leaf, from 2 in. to 5 in. long.
Now, by some entirely unknown process, the legume and the bacteria growing together succeed in extracting the nitrogen from the atmosphere which permeates the soil, and fixing this nitrogen in the tubercles and the roots in the form of nitrogen compounds. This, of course, furnishes a starting point for the reclaiming of the lost atmospheric nitrogen.
Vanellus cristatus, wing tubercles of the male. Vanessae, resemblance of lower surface of, to bark of trees. Variability, causes of; in man, analogous to that in the lower animals; of the races of man; greater in men than in women; period of, relation of the, to sexual selection; of birds; of secondary sexual characters in man.
Tubercles have been found in the lungs of infants at birth, born of consumptive parents, a proof, clear and demonstrative, that children inherit the several states of parental physiology existing at the time they received their physiological constitution.
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