Definition of "limbless"

[…] wert not thou to blame,To counsel me to give the Reins to Cyrus?Pleas’d me with Hopes, and fed my longing EarsWith cunning Tales of this ambitious Boy,And when myself wou’d fain have led my Armies,Made me lie down in Sloth, yielding to himThese Hands, these Feet, my Legions, and my Strength,And left me then a weak and limbless Body,Drench’d in Delights, and drown’d in studies Pleasures.

1696, John Banks, Cyrus the Great; or, The Tragedy of Love‎, London: W. Feales, published 1735, act I, scene 1

And then as to this beautiful tree, with which Mr. Serjeant has ornamented his ſpot—No, gentlemen, no ſuch matter at all; I am inſtructed to ſay quite the reverſe; a ſtunted tree, a blighted, blaſted tree; a tree not only limbleſs, and leafleſs, but very near lifeleſs; that was the true ſtate of the tree: […]

1770, Samuel Foote, The Lame Lover, a Comedy in Three Acts. […], London: […] Paul Vaillant; and sold by P[eter] Elmsly […]; and Robinson and Roberts, […], Act III, page 61

It was n't finished. It was purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing, with a horrible face, that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion.

1896, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “Doctor Moreau Explains”, in The Island of Doctor Moreau (Heinemann’s Colonial Library of Popular Fiction; 52), London: William Heinemann; republished as The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility, New York, N.Y.: Stone & Kimball, 1896, page 142

The squat, limbless growth of the prickly pear was not like the green growths of home, springing on light stalks to lovely flowers like butterflies captured out of air. It was more like the dead blind bubbling of some green, squalid slime: a world of plants that were as plain and flat as stones.

1930, G[ilbert] K[eith] Chesterton, “The Moderate Murderer”, in Four Faultless Felons, London, Toronto, Ont.: Cassell and Company, chapter 3 (The Man Who Could Not Hate), page 50