Word: lizards
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...from being an enthusiastic inhabitant of fire, as the ancients believed, the salamander must be moist, dies if it is even thoroughly dried out. Though no fire-eater, the lizard-like little creature is, however, something of a devil. He secretes in his skin a milky poison which causes most of his potential enemies to leave him severely alone. This skin poison is thought to be harmless...
Snake Eyes. Zoologist Gordon Lynn Walls, Wayne University College of Medicine : "The snakes are known to have originated from the lizards in a relatively recent geological period, but despite the closeness of relationship, the eyes of snakes differ so much in structure from those of lizards (including modern legless ones) that no one would suspect, from the eyes alone, that a snake is any more closely related to a lizard than a cat is to a frog...
...Later, the snakes emerged above ground and fought their way back to 'respectability.' To help accomplish this, they had to invent one substitute after another within the eye, to take the place of the lost lizard-eye features. The fact that the snake eye is such a bunch of ersatz thus sheds light, for the first time, upon the habits and history of the first serpents...
...there is also work to be done-rubber to be tapped in Sumatra, oil to be drilled for in Borneo and Java, tin to be dug in Bangka. Coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, rice are the more ordinary products; but copra as a basis for facial creams, lizard skins for shoes and handbags, Sumatra wrappers for cigars, cinchona bark for quinine, sandalwood and teakwood, ebony and macassar oil, and even the bare-breasted women of Bali, tourist paradise, do their full share in making this Netherlands overseas a going concern...
...scrapings, squeals, slimy drippings could be heard far down in its inky bowels. Author Sanderson went cautiously inside. Clusters of giant grey bats whirred out of potholes. Crabs the size of footballs, their eyes bugging like periscopes, squatted on the floor, waved huge pincers, hissed like snakes. A luminescent lizard slithered into a dark crevice. An enormous red rat nudged his foot. Giant spider-centipedes scuttled across his hands. Blood-sucking vampire bats gnashed from black ledges...