From inquiries made among French hatters by Dr Delaunay, some curious facts concerning heads have come to light. In families developing towards a higher intellectual standard, heads increase from generation to generation; while families failing intellectually, shew a regular decrease in size. The men who made the Revolution of 1789 had bigger heads than their fathers; while the sons of the present ruling families in France are craniologically so deficient that hats have to be made specially for them. In Paris the largest heads are to be found in the quarter of the schools, and among the schools themselves the secular stand above the ecclesiastical.
As flies are said to eat the animalcules in impure air, thus removing the seeds of disease, leanness in a fly is primâ facie evidence of pure air in a house, while corpulency indicates foul wall-paper and bad ventilation. Talking of a foul and fresh atmosphere, there has lately been adopted in India a novel method of giving change of air to people who cannot afford to leave home. Patients go up in a balloon, which ascends to a certain height, and is there made captive. It seems that a few days passed in this atmosphere, which is quite different from that on the plains beneath, temporarily braces up the most languid of invalids. The importance to health of a free perspiration no less than of fresh air, and what dangers arise from perspiration being suddenly checked, has been proved by the fact that a person covered completely with a compound, impervious to moisture, will not live over six hours. On the occasion of some papal ceremonies, a poor child was once gilded all over with varnish and gold-leaf to represent the Golden Age. No wonder that it died in a few hours, when we consider that the amount of liquid matter which passes through the pores of the skin in twenty-four hours in an adult person of sound health, is about sixteen fluid ounces, or one pint. Besides this, a large amount of carbonic acid—a gaseous body—passes through the tubes; so we cannot fail to see the importance of keeping them in perfect working order by frequent ablutions or other means.
It has often been stated that ocular weakness and diseases in various forms appear to have been rapidly increasing in recent times. Dr Loring, in discussing before the New York County Medical Society the serious question, ‘Is the human eye gradually changing its form under the influence of modern civilisation?’ confirms the opinion, so far at least as short-sightedness is concerned. Constant study, now incidental to the lives of so many, has, he says, a tendency to engender this derangement of the eye, and it is often transmitted to descendants. In his opinion, near-sightedness is a disease of childhood, and rarely develops itself after the fifteenth or eighteenth year. On examining the eyes of over two thousand scholars in the New York public schools, Dr Loring found that the proportion of those in a healthy condition were eighty-seven per cent. among children under seven years, while between that age and twenty-one, the proportion of normal eyes was but sixty-one; which shews, he thinks, that near-sightedness increases directly with the age to which schooling is extended. In Königsberg, Germany, he found considerably more than half the population were short-sighted; and in America it is more commonly met with among the older eastern cities than the new ones of the west. Among the most prominent causes of the disease are, in his opinion, a sedentary life, poor food, bad ventilation, and general disregard of hygienic requirements—all conducing to a laxity of tissue, of which near-sightedness is an indication.
The experiments of Mr G. F. Train on himself would seem to give some corroboration to the reports of fasting girls that crop up from time to time. In an attempt to prove that eating is merely ‘an acquired habit,’ he persisted in going without food for six days, and expects in time to be able to do without nourishment for a much longer period! His experiments, he asserts, prove three things: First, that all stories of terrible agony in starvation are nonsense; second, that fasting really improved his intelligence; and third, that a person who has fasted six days has no ravenous appetite. This, however, we should think is accounted for by the sufferer feeling quite past eating at a certain stage of starvation.—The problem of how to live on sixpence a day has been elucidated by a London physician, who writing in advocacy of vegetarianism, affirms that he knows many persons who keep themselves strong and well on that sum. He further says: ‘I have myself lived and maintained my full weight and power to work on threepence a day, and I have no doubt at all that I could live very well on a penny a day.’ The ‘penny restaurant’ lately announced in New York, where a small cup of coffee, bread and butter, pork and beans, a slice of corned beef, oatmeal, and boiled rice, may be obtained at a cost of one cent for each item, offers the very means of carrying out this theory. What kind of ‘living’ could be enjoyed on that insignificant sum, is not explained by the learned experimenter; but without pushing theory to such an extreme, it is evident that a more careful and judicious outlay of small incomes would enable many unthinking persons to live well and economically, who may now deem such a thing impossible.
The use of horse-flesh as an article of food has made great progress in Paris, where about a thousand horses per week are said to be slaughtered, the animals even being imported for that purpose. It is said that during the Exhibition, the hippophagists of Paris intend giving a banquet once a month to the journalists of all nations, where horse and ass flesh prepared in every seductive form will be served up.—The snail is becoming another fashionable article of diet in France, and for some time past a particular place has been appropriated for their sale in the Paris fish-markets. Snails, says one of the French journals, were highly esteemed by the Romans, our masters in gastronomy, and are now raised in many of the departments with success. In the sixteenth century the Capuchins of Fribourg possessed the art of fattening snails—an art not lost in our day, for in Lorraine and Burgundy they raise excellent snails, which find sure demand in the Paris market. There are now more than fifty restaurants and more than a thousand private tables in Paris where snails are accepted as a delicacy by upwards of ten thousand consumers; the monthly consumption of this mollusc being estimated at half a million. Frank Buckland tells us that snails are becoming scarce in the neighbourhood of London, where for some time snail-collecting has been a regular trade.
It is a curious fact that so many dwellings once the homes of poets should have been public-houses at one time or another. Burns’s native cottage was a house of this description; the house in which Moore was born was a whisky-shop; and Shelley’s house at Great Marlow, a beer-shop. Even Coleridge’s residence at Nether Stowey, the very house in which the poet composed his sweet Ode to the Nightingale, became an ordinary beer-house. A house in which James Montgomery lived for forty years at Sheffield was a beer-shop; and the birthplace of Kirke White is now a house for retailing intoxicating beverages.
Many facts relating to foreign countries, which strike Englishmen as being curious to a degree, reach us from time to time. A Spanish soldier, we are told, will fight for a week on an empty stomach, provided he can look forward to playing his guitar on the seventh day. In his country, if a bull intended for the fight falls ill, the animal is sent to an infirmary. The chief toreador Frasculeo has a fortune of two million francs; his combat costume represents one hundred thousand francs in diamonds alone; he is courted by the highest society in Madrid, is a member of the chief aristocratic club; yet his wife is a fishmonger’s daughter, and still helps her mother in the market. On days when her husband performs she sits at her balcony with her children to receive couriers, who come on horseback waving a white flag as a sign of success in the arena.—The account of how a titled lady in Russia has discovered to her cost the penalties of expressing in too emphatic a manner her disapproval of her governess’s behaviour, will, if true, convey a curious idea of some social customs in that country. The Princess Manweloff had a habit of striking her governess, a lady of noble birth, and the latter complained of her to the local justice. In this instance the law was a respecter of persons, and the Princess was ordered three days’ detention in her own house. The governess was dissatisfied, and appealed to a higher court, which sentenced the defendant to three months’ imprisonment in the common jail.—As a curious fact, it has been noted by Sir Samuel Baker that a negro has never been known to tame a wild elephant or any wild animal. The elephants employed by the ancient Carthaginians and Romans were trained by Arabs and others, never by negroes. It had often struck Sir Samuel as very distressing that the little children in Africa never had a pet animal; and though he often offered rewards for young elephants, he never succeeded in getting one alive.
A curious instance of the acquisition and rejection of fortune reaches us from New Orleans. A stableman named Pathier, belonging to an hotel in that city, suddenly found himself heir to eighty thousand francs at the death of his mother; yet strange to say refused to accept the money. The law has in vain endeavoured to induce him to avail himself of the windfall: his only ambition is to smoke his pipe and groom the horses. To such an instance of contempt of riches it would be difficult to find a parallel.
Some curious facts from the world of Nature crop up occasionally, which are well worthy of consideration. For instance, it has been proved that the bee may under certain circumstances turn out to be anything but the pattern of industry it is proverbially supposed to furnish. Australian colonists have from time to time taken out swarms of bees to their adopted land, in the hope of deriving practical benefit from the profusion of flowers with which the whole country abounds. For some little time the newly imported bees maintained their reputation for industry, storing up their food in the comfortable hives provided for them, and supplying the colonists with far superior honey to that collected by the indigenous honey-producers the ‘mellipones.’ Presently, however, the hives were discovered unstocked at the end of the autumn, notwithstanding the long summers of the northern parts of Australia, and it was found that the bees entirely neglected to lay by a stock of food, as was their wont. Though the bees increased and the hives were always regularly tenanted, no honey was brought home. It soon became evident that, finding the perennial summer of the tropical parts of Australia afforded them abundance of food, without the intervention of long winters, the bees forsook their old habits, gave themselves up to a life of happy indolence, and no longer took the trouble to convey their superabundant supplies to the hives prepared for them. In short, there being no winters to provide for, the bees gave up the practice of storing honey.
Tenacity of life in eels and cats is proverbial; but from an instance that occurred at Flinstow Farm, near Pembroke, it appears that the pig may claim to rank with other creatures in this respect. For sixteen days a pig was missed from the farmyard, and as every search failed to discover it, the conclusion was arrived at that it had been stolen. Some masons who were repairing a brick kiln on the farm one day discovered the missing animal, which had fallen into the kiln, and was unable to extricate itself. Though all that time without food, the pig when rescued was able to eat, and did not seem much the worse for its long imprisonment.