(uncountable, by extension) The collection or mass of such outgrowths, filaments, or fibers growing or projecting from the surface of an object or organism.

It had been incurred by a little fellow, young, a novice, an afterguardsman absent from his assigned post when the ship was being put about.

This was the phrase of that interesting mystic St. Paul (Saul) of Tarsus […] who did so much to pervert and enlarge the simpler cosmopolitan fraternalism of Jesus of Nazareth […] before it was finally overwhelmed and lost in the sacrificial sacerdotalism of formal Christianity.

Earth, the great mother, begins to live. Romping like a child she rises from her bath in the spring floods, from her douche in the spring rain.