Excerpt: ... if they were coals. Hand them out carefully." The laborer fished out the wet and muddy bones one by one from the sack, and as he laid them on the table the surgeon arranged them in their proper relative positions. "This has been a neatly executed job," he remarked; "none of your clumsy hacking with a chopper or a saw. The bones have been cleanly separated at the joints. The fellow who did this must have had some anatomical knowledge, unless he was a butcher, which by the way, is not impossible. He has used his knife uncommonly skilfully, and you notice that each arm was taken off with the scapula attached, just as a butcher takes off a shoulder of mutton. Are there any more bones in that bag?" "No, sir," replied the laborer, wiping his hands with an air of finality on the posterior aspect of his trousers; "that's the lot." The surgeon looked thoughtfully at the bones as he gave a final touch to their arrangement, and remarked: "The inspector is right. All the bones of the neck are there. Very odd. Don't you think so?" "You mean--" "I mean that this very eccentric murderer seems to have given himself such an extraordinary amount of trouble for no reason that one can see. There are these neck vertebrae, for instance. He must have carefully separated the skull from the atlas instead of just cutting through the neck. Then there is the way he divided the trunk; the twelfth ribs have just come in with this lot, but the twelfth dorsal vertebra to which they belong was attached to the lower half. Imagine the trouble he must have taken to do that, and without cutting or hacking the bones about, either. It is extraordinary. This is rather interesting, by the way. Handle it carefully." He picked up the breast-bone daintily-for it was covered with wet mud-and handed it to me with the remark: "That is the most definite piece of evidence we have." "You mean," I said, "that the union of the two parts into a single mass fixes this as the skeleton of an...