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A cushion for terminating or softening a note made by a stringed instrument with a keyboard.

mummy cases of Egypt. No botanist now believes that genuine mummy wheat has been made to germinate in modern times. -- To beat to a mummy, to beat to a senseless mass; to beat soundly.

ich the text and action are not interrupted by set arias, duets, etc., the music being determined throughout by dramatic appropriateness; musical drama of this character, in general. It involves the use of a kind of melodious declamation, the development of leitmotif, great orchestral elaboration, and a fusion of poetr…

atic shrub. See Abelmosk. -- Musk orchis (Bot.), a European plant of the Orchis family (Herminium Minorchis); -- so called from its peculiar scent. -- Musk ox (Zoöl.), an Arctic hollow-horned ruminant (Ovibos moschatus), now existing only in America, but found fossil in Europe and Asia. It is covered with a thick coa…

An instrument for determining and recording the different phases, as the intensity, velocity, etc., of a muscular contraction.

is now chiefly used in tanning and dyeing. Myrobolans are produced by various species of Terminalia of the East Indies, and of Spondias of South America.

The terminal horny plate on the beak of ducks, and other allied birds.

A race or people, as determined by common language and character, and not by political bias or divisions; a nation. the fulfillment of his mission is to be looked for in the condition of nationalities and the character of peoples. H. W. Beecher.

Fixed or determined by nature; pertaining to the constitution of a thing; belonging to native character; according to nature; essential; characteristic; not artifical, foreign, assumed, put on, or acquired; as, the natural growth of animals or plants; the natural motion of a gravitating body; natural strength or dispos…

ships or vessels from one place to another, including, more especially, the method of determining a ship's position, course, distance passed over, etc., on the surface of the globe, by the principles of geometry and astronomy.

und in India, Malaya, etc., which have the leaves prolonged into a kind of stout tendril terminating in a pitcherlike appendage, whence the plants are often called pitcher plants and monkey-cups. There are about thirty species, of which the best known is Nepenthes distillatoria. See Pitcher plant.

e fronds of ferns, and their nervation, are frail characters if employed alone for the determination of existing genera. J. D. Hooker.

les; expressing or designating that which is of neither sex; as, a neuter noun; a neuter termination; the neuter gender.

t eighty feet of shale supporting a greater thickness of limestone, which is gradually undermined by the removal of the shale. See Chart of Geology.

An apparatus for determining the amount of nitrogen or some of its compounds in any substance subjected to analysis; an azotometer.

An instrument for determining and registering the duration of more or less complex operations of the mind. Dunglison.

Any melody determined by inviolable rules. [Obs.]

To determine, adjudge, or record (a plaintiff) as having dropped his suit, upon his withdrawal or failure to follow it up. "When two are joined in a writ, and one is nonsuited." Z. Swift.

p. applied to a body formed in the developing ovum from the plasma of the nucleus of the germinal vesicle.

or lie, in a nutshell, to be within a small compass; to admit of very brief or simple determination or statement. "The remedy lay in a nutshell." Macaulay.