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the Cheiroptera, an order of flying mammals, in which the wings are formed by a membrane stretched between the elongated fingers, legs, and tail. The common bats are small and insectivorous. See Cheiroptera and Vampire. Bat tick (Zoöl.), a wingless, dipterous insect of the genus Nycteribia, parasitic on bats.…

izontal timbers of a building or ship. The beams of a vessel are strong pieces of timber stretching across from side to side to support the decks. Totten.

A conformation like a bench; a long stretch of flat ground, or a kind of natural terrace, near a lake or river. Bench mark (Leveling), one of a number of marks along a line of survey, affixed to permanent objects, to show where leveling staffs were placed. -- Bench of bishops, the whole body of English prelates assemb…

A portable boat made of skins stretched on a frame. [Alaska] The Century.

The stretch which a ship makes in one tack.

nd the next course of bricks with their lengths parallel to the face of the wall, called stretchers; Flemish bond (Fig.2), where each course consists of headers and stretchers alternately, so laid as always to break joints; Cross bond, which differs from the English by the change of the second stretcher line so that it…

A line of connected floating timbers stretched across a river, or inclosing an area of water, to keep saw logs, etc., from floating away. Boom iron, one of the iron rings on the yards through which the studding-sail booms traverse. -- The booms, that space on the upper deck of a ship between the foremast and mainmast,…

An instrument to stretch and widen the leg of a boot, consisting of two pieces, together shaped like a leg, between which, when put into the boot, a wedge is driven. The pretty boots trimly stretched on boottrees. Thackeray.

An appliance consisting of an elastic rod, with a number of horse hairs stretched from end to end of it, used in playing on a stringed instrument.

A stock at each end of a seine to keep it stretched.

the person to be rescued, is hung by short ropes from a block which runs upon the hawser stretched from the ship to the shore, and is drawn to land by hauling lines. -- Breeches pipe, a forked pipe forming two branches united at one end. -- Knee breeches, breeches coming to the knee, and buckled or fastened there; sm…

A sudden opening, as of landscape; a stretch; an expanse. [R.] "A fine burst of country." Jane Austen.

he leaves of the cabbage. -- Cabbage Beetle (Zoöl.), a small, striped flea-beetle (Phyllotreta vittata) which lives, in the larval state, on the roots, and when adult, on the leaves, of cabbage and other cruciferous plants. -- Cabbage butterfly (Zoöl.), a white butterfly (Pieris rapæ of both Europe and America, and t…

of kid skin. Fig.: Used as a symbol of flexibility. [Obs.] Here's wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad. Shak.

shrill sound by pecular organs in the under side of the abdomen, consisting of a pair of stretched membranes, acted upon by powerful muscles. A noted American species (C. septendecim) is called the seventeen year locust. Another common species is the dogday cicada.

Formerly an allowance of two pounds in every three hundred weight after the tare and tret are subtracted; now used only in a general sense, of small deductions from the original weight. [Written also clough.] McCulloch.

A series of muscular contractions due to sudden stretching of the muscle, -- a sign of certain neuropathies.

A gripping device, as for stretching wire, etc., consisting of two jaws so attached to a ring that they are closed by pulling on the ring.

coming above the ankle, and having the sides made in part of some elastic material which stretches to allow the boot to be drawn on and off. [U.S.] -- Congress water, a saline mineral water from the Congress spring at Saratoga, in the State of New York.

A machine used in ropewalks to stretch the yarn.