Word: viscera
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...State agencies shot rabbits and ground squirrels, trapped mice, dug dead prairie dogs from their burrows. They took their catches in tight-woven bags to trucks outfitted as laboratories, parked in the shadows of mountains. They combed the rodents for fleas, then slit the carcasses to remove certain viscera and tissues. In many viscera the bacteriologists found what they feared would be there: the oval bacteria of Pasteurella pestis-the plague, the Black Death...
...impossible to tell, from a bullet's point of entrance, what track it may have taken. Often missiles passed clear through the abdomen without damaging any of the viscera. He added that the recovery rate for persons injured by revolver bullets was "flattering" to the operating surgeon...
Siamese Twins are identical twins who are not completely separated. "True Siamese twins consist of two nearly complete individuals united obliquely side by side in the hip region. Internally there are two complete sets of viscera, except that there is usually a common rectum." Their organs are symmetrical, one heart slanting to the right, the other to the left. But for some mysterious reason, they are often very unlike in facial features and personality...
...worth the space). Probably the most cheerfully cold-blooded reporting in the book is in Genêt's accounts of several eminent French murder cases. Sample (of a couple of life-insurance murders): "Both mates were tucked into the potter's field where their viscera were soon too general for exhumation...
Many a psychologist conducts his researches on animal intelligence by noting how rats run through a maze. If you were a psychologist, and got hold of a race of rats showing high susceptibility to constipation, fallen arches, varicose veins, stomach ulcers, hernia, sagging viscera, poor circulation, crooked and decaying teeth, spinal curvature, sacroiliac trouble, bad tonsils and audible adenoids, you would undoubtedly find this afflicted race much more stupid at maze running than normal, healthy rats. You would conclude that rats with the best biological endowment are the most intelligent rats, and that your afflicted, stupid rat race was headed...