Rachis to a short segment of the rachis. This is significant in the history of agriculture, and referred to by archaeologists as a "brittle rachis", one type of shattering in crop plants. Rachis Rachis is a biological term for a main axis or "shaft" (from the Greek "ράχις, backbone, spine"). In vertebrates a "rachis" can refer to the series of articulated vertebrae, which encase the spinal cord. In this case the "rachis" usually forms the supporting axis of the body and is then called the spine or vertebral column. "Rachis" can also mean the central shaft of pennaceous feathers. In the
Calamus (poems) sequence as written celebrates many aspects of "comradeship" or "adhesive love," Whitman's term, borrowed from phrenology to describe male same-sex attraction. This attraction is presented in its political, spiritual, metaphysical, and personal phases—Whitman offering it as the backbone of future nations, the root of religious sentiments, the solution to the big questions of life, and as a source of personal anguish and joy. The 1860 edition contains three poems that Whitman would later edit out of the sequence, including the very personal Calamus 8, "Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me," and Calamus 9, "Hours continuing long, sore