The symptoms of acute nitrate poisoning are quite characteristic provided the affected animals are not disturbed. In the early stages the animal stops eating, froths at the mouth and has abdominal pain and diarrhoea.

He[…]retayned to hymselfe but a small lyueng, and that was the sextenry of our lady churche in Renes.

Dr. Gertsch advised us that scorpions are remote relatives of spiders — no closer than a wasp is to a snout beetle — and that the rare ancient spider he nabbed was a hypochilid, dating back two hundred and fifty million years to the Carboniferous Age.

It was a lovely morning, as I said, and the Turks, who are early risers, were sitting on the graves of their kindred with their veiled wives and children, the marble turbans in that thickly-sown nekropolis less numerous than those of the living, who had come, not to mourn the dead who lay beneath, but to pass a day of idleness and pleasure on the spot endeared by their memories.