acephalous

[…] Mr. Cruickshank saw a Monster nine Months old, which lived thirty-six Hours after it was born, though it had no Cranium: […] But is this a Reason that we should believe the vital Functions and the Increase of the Body have no dependence on the Brain? I think not: for such acephalous Subjects never live long […]

an acephalous society / community

They have acephalous or headless Verses, which commence with a short Syllable instead of a long one:

Men wrote eloquently, because they wrote feelingly: they wrote idiomatically, because they wrote naturally, and without affectation: but if a false or acephalous structure of sentence,—if a barbarous idiom—or an exotic word happened to present itself, no writer of the 17th century seems to have had any such scrupulous sense of the dignity belonging to his own language, as should make it a duty to reject it, or worth his while to re-model a line.