air-vesicle

Definitions

noun In entomology, a dilatation of the trachea of certain insects, which enables them to change their specific gravity by filling the trachea with or emptying it of air.
noun In ichthyology, a vesicle containing air, connected with the swim-bladder and also with the ear-parts.
noun Same as air-float.

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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a yellow opaque substance, not unlike the coarse earthenware used in the making of ginger-beer bottles; but though it had been so completely molten that it had dropped into a hollow beneath in long viscid trails, it did not contain a single air-vesicle; while another specimen, apparently a piece of fused mica-schist, was so filled with air-cells, that the dividing partitions were scarcely the tenth of a line in thickness.

The Cruise of the Betsey or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland Hugh Miller 1829