Fascinating Facts ~Page 18~

Human Oddities: In the late nineteenth century doctors discovered a Mexican porter named Paul Rodrigues who had a horn more than 4 inches long protruding from the upper part of this forehead. The horn was divided into three principal shafts and had a circumference of about 14 inches. Rodrigues wore a special pointed cap to hide it. This case was by no means unique. Sir W. J. Erasmus Wilson, a nineteenth-century English dermatologist, recorded ninety cases of human horns---forty-four females and forty-six males. Of these ninety cases, the majority of the horns were situated on the head. A few, however, grew from the face (several on the nose), some from the thighs, back, and foot, and one from the penis.

Mathematics & Numbers: The Babylonians developed a series of advanced quadratic equations centuries before the birth of Christ.

Animals: Cats have no ability to taste sweet things.

The Universe: A pulsar is a small star made up of neutrons so densely packed together that if one the size of a silver dollar landed on earth, it would weigh approximately 100 million tons.

Literature: Fagin, the sinister villain in Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist," was also the name of Dickens' best friend, Bob Fagin.

Royalty: At the court of Louis XIV, prestige was measured by the height of the chair one was allowed to sit in. Only the King and Queen could sit in chairs with arms.

Death: In ancient Egypt, when merchants left the country on business trips they carried small stone models of themselves. If they died while abroad, these figures were sent back to Egypt for proxy burial.

Language: In Middle English the word "minister" meant "lowly person." It was originally adopted as a term of humility for men of the church.

Medicine: There is a disease called ichthyosis that turns the skin scaly like a fish.

The Classical and Ancient World: The famous quotation that appears on the front of the General Post Office in New York City, U.S.A.---"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"---is more than two thousand years old. It is taken from the writings of Herodotus, who lived in the fourth century B.C.

The Earth: The oldest rocks in the world, the so-called St. Peter and St. Paul stones in the Atlantic Ocean, are 4 billion years old.

The Black Plague: In 1347, when the Black Plague was raging through Europe, the citizens of Lübeck, Germany, to appease the wrath of God, descended on the churches and monasteries with enormous amounts of money and riches. The monks and priests inside one of these monasteries, fearful of contamination, barred their gates and would not allow the citizens to enter. The persistent crowd threw valuables, coins, gold, and jewels over the walls; the frightened monks threw all of it back. The back-and-forth tossing continued for hours, until the clerics finally gave up and allowed the riches to remain. Within hours piles 3 and 4 feet high arose, and for months following the incident---some say for years---the money remained untouched, a testament to the power of self-preservation over greed.

Manners & Customs: Tibetans drink tea made of salt and rancid yak butter. Tibetan women carry a special instrument with metal blades for cleaning their ears and picking their nose.

Inventions: The parachute was invented more than a hundred years before the airplane. It was the creation of a Frenchman, Louis Lenormand, who designed it in 1783 to save people who had to jump from burning buildings. In 1797 Jacques Garnerin gave a public exhibition of parachuting, descending 3,000 feet from a balloon.

Insects & Spiders: Every night, wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles into postiion, stretch out at right angles to the stem, and, with legs dangling, fall asleep.

Food & Drink: Wadakin and Matsuzuka beef, raised in Japan, are considered the two most tender kinds of beef in the world. The steers from which this meat is taken are isolated in totally dark stalls, fed on beer and beer mash, and hand-massaged by specially trained beef masseurs three times a day.

The Universe: The star Antares is 60,000 times larger than our sun. If our sun were the size of a softball, the star Antares would be as large as a house.

Language: The original name for the butterfly was "flutterby."

People: Faust, the protagonist of works by Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, and dozens of other writers, was an actual person. Johann Faust was a sixteenth-century doctor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany. Many stories were told about him during his lifetime, including one in which he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth and wisdom. The tale captured the imagination of authors for centuries afterward.

Birds: The average hummingbird weighs less than a penny. It has a body temperature of 111 degrees and beats its wings more than 75 times a second. Its newborn are the size of bumblebees and its nest is the size of a walnut. The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backward.

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