bone-work

Past polemics on such subjects become through time utterly dead and unmeaning and while we look for a living face in them, we find a mere empty skull — a hollow logical bone-work, from which the spirit has fled long years ago.

Luther and Other Leaders of the Reformation

See beneath its throat this large pouch; it communicates with the lungs, and also with the hollow and wonderfully light bone-work of its skeleton.

In the Eastern Seas