Pennaceous feather Pennaceous feather The pennaceous feather is a type of feather present in most modern birds and in some other species of maniraptoriform dinosaurs. A pennaceous feather has a stalk or quill. Its basal part, called a "calamus", is embedded in the skin. The calamus is hollow and has pith formed from the dry remains of the feather pulp, and the calamus opens below by an "inferior umbilicus" and above by a "superior umbilicus". The stalk above the calamus is a solid "rachis" having an umbilical groove on its underside. Pennaceous feathers have a rachis with "vanes" or "vaxillum " spreading
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