| 释义 |
excitability|ɛkˌsaɪtəˈbɪlɪtɪ|
[f. next: see -ity. Cf. Fr. excitabilité.]
1. The quality of being excitable, liability or tendency to excitement; in pl. excitable feelings.
a1803Foster in Life & Corr. (1846) I. 187 Excitement is excitability too. 1840Carlyle Heroes (1858) 250, I fancy, the rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make happy. 1863Geo. Eliot Romola III. 60 Romola..shrank..from the shrill excitability of those illuminated women.
2. Phys. Of an animal or vegetable organ or tissue: The capacity of being excited to its characteristic activity by the action of a specific stimulus. (In the Brunonian physiology excitability or incitability was regarded as the essential principle of vitality; the earlier quots. refer more or less to this theory.)
1788J. Brown Elem. Med. §14 The property, by which both sets of powers act, should be named Excitability; and the powers themselves Exciting Powers. 1799E. Darwin Phytol. xiv. i. i. 316 The buds of vegetables..possess irritability, and sensibility, and voluntarity, and have associations of motion..But..the three latter kinds of excitability are possessed in a much less degree by vegetable buds. 1802Med. Jrnl. VIII. 333 Opium acts primarily on the living principle, or, as he terms it, excitability of the system. 1807J. E. Smith Phys. Bot. 65 In forced plants the irritability, or..excitability, is exhausted. 1825Coleridge Aids Refl. (1848) I. 34 Pleasure..consists in the harmony between the specific excitability of a living creature, and the exciting causes correspondent thereto. 1854Bushnan in Circ. Sc. (c 1865) II. 3/1 The chemical laws are brought into operation by the agency of an organic excitability. 1866Huxley Phys. ix. (1872) 220 The excitability of the retina is readily exhausted. |