They think they can turn him into something rich and strange —turn him in a single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new ruddertail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions.

The settlements of a refugitive nature (2a) are hard to be determined. First of all they were conditioned by the occasional refugitive needs of the people and their property.

A blind date is a blinkered meeting / A rendez-vous with some person unknown / A secret tryst, a shady dealing / A gambler's chance when love's dice are thrown

From the ward, the nurses communicate with the HIS through a telestation.