Fascinating Facts ~Page 12~

Occupations: In India, letter carriers in the nineteenth century carried a long stick with several iron plates fixed to the end. If they were set upon by wild beast or snakes, they rattled the stick at their attackers. In the nineteenth century, the typical load carried by an Indian mailman might exceed 80 pounds. In certain areas of the country, these mailmen would travel their route at a trot, covering as much as 100 miles in less than two days.

Mathematics & Numbers: When one adds up the number of letters in the names of the playing cards---ace (3), two (3), three (5), four (4), five (4), six (3), seven (5), eight (5), nine (4), ten (3), jack (4), queen (5), king (4)---the total comes to 52, the precise number of cards in a deck.

Babies & Birth: Newborn babies are not blind. Studies have shown that newborns have approximately 20/50 vision and can easily discriminate between degrees of brightness.

Fashion: The natives of Kandahar, Afghanistan, wear turbans which when unwrapped are 20 feet long.

Royalty: Every queen named Jane has either been murdered, imprisoned, gone mad, died young, or been dethroned.

Holidays: Mother's Day was started by a woman named Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia, U.S.A. In 1907 Mrs. Jarvis began a campaign for the nationwide celebration of motherhood. At first no one paid much attention to her, but gradually churches and local town organizations began inviting her to speak at their meetings. Soon her notions caught on throughout the country, and on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made the holiday official.

Inventions: As of 1940, a total of ninety-four patents had been taken out on shaving mugs.

The Black Plague: The Black Plague killed so many people in the French city of Avignon in the fourteenth century that Pope Clement was obliged to consecrate the entire Rhone River so that bodies could be thrown into it en masse for group burials.

Animals: The kinkajou's tail is twice as long as its body. Every night it wraps itself in its tail and uses it as a pillow.

Crime: Forensic scientists can determine a person's sex, age, and race by examining a single strand of hair.

Geography: There is only one river in the world that has its source near the equator and from there flows into a temperate zone: the Nile. For some little-understood reason, the flow of most rivers is in the opposite direction.

Food & Drink: Chop suey was invented in the United States. Its creator was a Chinese dignitary visiting America in the nineteenth century. Requested by American friends to prepare authentic Chinese meal and not having the proper ingredients, the Chinese gentleman ordered his cook to collect all available foods, pour them into a large pot, and flavor the whole thing with soya sauce, which was still relatively new and exotic to the western palate. Asked the name of this delicious concoction, the dignitary, spotting a pair of chopsticks lying near the bottle of soya sauce, replied, "Chop-soya." Through his heavy Chinese accent this became "chop suey," and so it has remained ever since.

The Classical World: Until the time of the Caesars, all Romans were vegetarians.

People: Sir Christopher Wren, designer of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, was not an architect. He was a mathematician and an astronomer. Wren was in fact a great astronomer, having developed a method for computing eclipses and another for measuring the rings of Saturn.

The Earth: If the earth were compressed to a sphere with a 2-inch diameter, its surface would be as smooth as a billiard ball's.

Art and Artists: The Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) painted more than three hundred pictures of the same lily pads. The now-famous plants grew in a pond behind his house.

Death: Henry IV of France (1553 - 1610) was exhumed nearly two hundred years after his death so that a death mask of his face could be made.

The body: An average of 400 million sperms are contained in a single human ejaculation.

Architecture and Construction: There are 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building in New York, U.S.A.

Medicine: Dr. John Cohausen wrote a book in 1743 "proving" that one could live to be 115 years old by inhaling the breath of little girls. In his book, "Hermippus Redivivus," Dr. Cohausen gave the following prescription: take 1 pound of gum olibani, 2 ounces of styrae, myrrh, and several other herbs, mix, burn, and inhale while at the same time imbibing the exhalations of the nearest little girl.

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