Fascinating Facts ~Page 14~

Babies & Birth: Until the 1920's, babies in Finland were delivered in saunas. The heat was thought to help combat infection, and the warm atmosphere was considered pleasing to the infant.

Royalty: Jahangir, a seventeenth-century Indian Mughal ruler, had 5,000 women in his harem and 1,000 young boys. He also owned 12,000 elephants.

Animals: The now-extinct ancestor of the horse, eohippus, had a short neck, a pug muzzle, and stood no higher than a medium-sized dog.

Executions: Until recent times, prisoners condemned to death in Mongolia were nailed into wooden boxes and left on the plains to die of exposure and starvation.

Fashion: In eighteenth-century England eyeglasses were often worn purely as fashionable accessories, not as aids to vision. Such glasses were frequently set in gold frames decorated with precious jewels. Sometimes the lenses were removed completely, leaving only the decorative frame to ornament the face.

Birds: An eagle can attack, kill, and carry away an animal as large as a young deer. The harpy eagle of South America feeds on monkeys.

China: Chang Hsien-chung, a Chinese bandit, is credited with having killed 40 million people between 1643 and 1648. He completely wiped out the population of Szechwan province.

Art & Artist: During the Napoleonic Wars, Napolean's soldiers bivouacked in the chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where Leonardo's "Last Supper" is located. The soldiers used the painting in target practice, shooting at the central figure of Christ's head. That is why the face of Christ is almost obliterated in the painting.

The Classical World: The ancient Greek leader Pericles was so self-concious about his pointed head that he would only pose for portraits wearing a helmet.

Food & Drink: Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.

Literature: Voltaire considered Shakespeare's works so deplorable that he referred to the Bard as "that drunken fool."

People: John Paul Jones (1747 - 1792), famous American naval hero of the American Revolution, was a bastard by birth, an actor by trade, lived under an assumed name most of his life, practiced piracy, was wanted for two murders, was tried for the rape of a young girl, and died penniless. Born out of wedlock in Scotland and originally named John Paul, he became an actor with a stock company in Jamaica at the age of eleven, playing a role in Steele's "Concious Lovers." He later shipped out as a sailor on a West Indies slave ship, where he flogged one shipmate to death and killed another (many say in self-defense) on the island of Tobago. Fleeing to America, he assumed the name Jones to avoid detection and eventually distinguished himself during the American Revolution. After the war, Jones became a mercenary sailor, at various times consorting with pirates and selling slaves. Later, when sailing under the Russian flag, he was accused in St. Petersburg of assaulting a young girl and only after a lengthy trial was he acquitted. The latter part of John Paul Jones's life was lived more or less in embittered anonymity, and he died forgotten in France, buried in an unmarked grave in St. Louis Cemetery. It was not until a century later, through the efforts of an American ambassador named Horace Porter, that his remains were exhumed, brought back to the U.S., and buried in a tomb inside the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland---which today is a national shrine.

Flowers, Plants & Trees: The General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park, California, U.S.A., is the largest tree in the world. It weighs more than 6,000 tons.

Death: In Turkey the color of mourning is violet. In most Moslem countries and in China the color is white.

The Bible: Studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that the passage in the Bible known as the Sermon on the Mount is actually an ancient Essene prayer dating to hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.

Fish: An electric eel can produce a shock of more than 600 volts, five times more powerful than a household outlet. It not only uses this power to kill its prey but to locate it as well---though it is born with eyes, it is blind as an adult and employs its electricity to find food in much the same way as man uses radar.

Movies & Movie Stars: In 1939, Hollywood film companies produced an average of two motion pictures every day.

Human Oddities: Josephine Clofullia, the most famous bearded lady of all time and a prominent attraction in P. T. Barnum's side show in the nineteenth century, had a beard 6 inches long when she was only sixteen. Josephine was an ardent admirer of the French monarch Napoleon III, and she styled her beard after his. So sincerely flattered was the ruler when he learned of this imitation that he sent Madame Clofullia a large diamond, which she wore, appropriately, in her beard.

Food and Diet: There are 15,000 different kinds of rice.

Insects & Spiders: Only female bees work. Males remain in the hive and literally do nothing, their only mission in life being to fertilize the queen bee on her maiden flight. For this purpose literally thousands of males are hatched, out of which only one or two mate with the queen. After they have served their function, the males are not allowed back into the hive but are left outside, where they starve to death.

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