inosculate

To homogenize; to make continuous.

To open into.

The party left the town of Martaban on the 20th March; they passed two grassy and level islands just above the junction of the Gyein river with the main one. […] This inosculating river is about half the breadth of the Sanloon.

To unite.

Clouds sometimes inosculate with smoke. Howard mentions several cases in his Journals. "The smoke of London," he observes, "when passing away in a body swelled up into distinct heaps, each of which inosculated at its summit with a small Cloud. Groups of Cumulo Stratus, the Cumulus and Cirro Stratus occupied the South part of the sky attracting smoke."

To intercommunicate; to interjoin.

But that, alas! is impossible. Hearken to the nature of the fix in which I find myself, and say if you ever heard of a worse. Under ordinary circumstances, if one outruns the usual allowance of space, one has but to say at the foot of the paper, To be continued, and all is healed. Any paper may be adjourned from month to month,—true, but not from volume to volume; and, unhappily for me, this very week's number, in which I am now writing, closes a volume. The several monthly divisions of the journal may inosculate, but not the several volumes.

Pertaining to or characterized by inosculation.

However, not all physicians of that age were convinced about the inosculate nature of these diseases, and debate continued unabated until the tragic self-experimentation of John Hunter in 1767.

The choice between normal, inverse, and inosculate strategies required some attention if only to emphasize the difference between the inosculate approach and much early work on numerical taxonomy.