Fascinating Facts ~Page 10~

Animals: The largest living species of kangaroo has a head the size of a sheep's and may stand 7 feet tall. An extinct species of kangaroo had a head the size of a Shetland pony's and reached a height of more than 10 feet. There are miniature kangaroos, such as the musk kangaroo, that are no bigger than a jackrabbit.

Theater: Slapstick comedy is named after an actual slapping stick. The stick, which came to be equated with broad farce in the sixteenth century as part of the Italian commedia dell'arte, was used by the comic hero Harlequin to whack the rumps of artless stooges. It was made of two pieces of wood joined together to make a slapping sound when it hit.

China: In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peking, one took revenge against one's enemies by placing finely chopped tiger's whiskers in their food. The numerous infinitesimal whisker barbs would get caught in the victim's digestive tract and cause hundreds of painful sores and infections.

Architecture & Construction: Nobody knows who built the Taj Mahal. The names of the architects, masons, and designers that have come down to us have all proved to be latter-day inventions, and there is no evidence to indicate who the real creators were.

Babies & Birth: Children born in the month of May are on the average 200 grams heavier at birth than children born in any other month.

Fashion: Fashionable women in medieval Japan gilded or blackened their teeth. Today many Hindu women in India stain their teeth bright red to enhance their appearance.

Sports: The Cleveland Indians were named in honor of Louis Sockolexis, a native Maine Indian who was the first American Indian to play professional baseball. Before it became the Indians, the Cleveland team was known as the Spiders.

Medicine: Humans are susceptible to a disease called the "laughing sickness." People stricken with this disease literally laugh themselves to death. The disease is known in only one place in the world, among the Kuru tribe of New Guinea.

Animals: A horse focused its eye by changing the angle of its head, not by changing the shape of the lens of the eye, as humans do.

Executions: People condemned to the guillotine in France during the French revolution had the top of their head shaved. Two long locks of hair were left hanging at the temples.

Birds: The female knot-tying weaverbird will refuse to mate with a male who has built a shoddy nest. If spurned, the male must take the nest apart and completely rebuild it in order to win the affections of the female.

Presidents: James Madison, 5 feet, 4 inches tall, was the shortest president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln was the tallest at 6 feet, 4 inches.

Inventions: The telephone was not invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Its first creator was a German, Philip Reis, who in 1861 made a primitive sending-receiving transmitter which he called the "telephone." Twelve years later Elisha Gray of Chicago, U.S.A. completed a short-distance telephone communication. Bell's invention, patented in March, 1876, was distinguished by the fact that it was the first sending-receiving mechanism over which the human voice could be transmitted.

Human Oddities: Richeborg, a dwarf who was raised as a servant of the Orléans family in eighteenth-century France and who stood 23 inches high at maturity, was employed by the aristocracy as a secret agent during the French Revolution. Disguised as an infant and wrapped in swaddling clothes, Richeborg was taken in and out of Paris in the arms of his "nurse," all the while carrying crucial secret dispatches. Richeborg died in Paris at slightly less than a hundred years of age.

Gambling: Gamblers in ancient Greece made dice from the anklebones and shoulder blades of sheep.

Minerals & Precious Metals: The term "magnetism" is derived from the region of Magnesia in Asia Minor, where a black mineral known as the Iodestone is mined. Because of its magnetic properties, the Iodestone was used by ancient seamen to navigate their ships, as a compass is used today.

Energy: A car operates at maximum economy, gas-wise, at speeds between 25 and 35 miles per hour. A car that shifts manually gets 2 miles more per gallon of gas than a car with automatic shift. A car uses 1.6 ounces of gas idling for one minute. Half an ounce is used to start the average automobile.

Worms & Sea Creatures: The snail mates only once in its entire life. When it does mate, however, it may take as long as twelve hours to consummate the act.

Manners & Customs: The pilgrims in Massachusetts, U.S.A., used a special tool in church, a wooden ball attached to a long string on a stick. If anyone fell asleep during a sermon (which might go on for seven or eight hours) a specially appointed member of the clergy would hoist the pole over the reprobate's head and clop him with the wooden ball.

Language: To "decimate" does not mean to obliterate or wipe out. It means to destroy one-tenth of something. Originally the word referred to a Roman military tradition in which an entire troop would be punished for disobedience by decimation, that is, by the killing of every tenth man. There are accounts of this form of punishment being used in the English and French armies up to the time of World War I.

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