Common symptoms of ecosystem disintegrity include the loss of self-regulatory functions (e.g. impaired nutrient recycling and productivity) and dramatic shifts in biotic community structure from dominance by relatively large, long-lived native species to dominance by smaller, short-lived exotics.

I know one patient who couldn't take the tabs but could tolerate liquid doxy.

He wasn't keen on spiders and snakes, but his major one, the one that had always haunted and taunted him is referred to medically as tomophobia; the fear of surgical operations.

He was speaking to an indifferent audience of pale polite faces, in an overheated space on the Northern edge of Europe, a subcontinent whose natives for a few passing centuries had bullied and buffaloed the rest of the world.