: Their saliva contains hirudin , a powerful natural anticoagulant that keeps blood from clotting—a feature highly valued in modern medicine. John Leech's Illustrations of A Christmas Carol (1843)
For fans of the natural world, the "text" of a leech's biology is fascinating: Leechy
: His work with Mick Short, Style in Fiction , provides a comprehensive checklist of lexical features used to analyse the style of prose. : Their saliva contains hirudin , a powerful