Definition of "excrescence"

I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl’s hair must be cut off entirely; I will send a barber to-morrow: and I see others who have far too much of the excrescence—that tall girl, tell her to turn round.

1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VII, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […]

The squirrels were in hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.

1903 July, Jack London, “The Sounding of the Call”, in The Call of the Wild, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., page 219

Perhaps he meant that towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

1907 April, E[dward] M[organ] Forster, chapter XXXIII, in The Longest Journey, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, part III (Wiltshire), page 336

It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XXXI, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], page 234