An Egg That Holds Two Gallons

1895

One of the most interesting specimens in the National museum at Washington is a cast of an egg of most gigantic size, which was found in a guana bed on the island of Madagascar about 25 years ago. The shell of this egg will hold almost exactly two gallons of liquid, which would make its capacity equal to 148 average sized eggs laid by the common barnyard fowl. The bird which laid this mammoth egg is now extinct and has been for probably 200 years. To the scientist — who knows it by its bones and eggs — it is known as the epiornis, and its restored skeletons prove it to have been a bird at least 12 feet in height. Arab sailors who visited Madagascar centuries ago, when the epiornis was still living, are believed to have brought back the stories concerning it which finally developed into the fabulous narratives of the roc. — St. Louis Republic.


Simple

A woman living in the north of England, not being able to tell the time by the clock, was asked one day by a friend how she knew when it was time to get her husband's dinner ready. She answered, "When the big finger points to the pantry door and the little finger to Mrs. X.'s (meaning her next door neighbor), then I know." — London Tit-Bits.


Trivia

Cleopatra is said to have spoken all the languages used by her subjects, together with Latin and Greek. Altogether she understood 11 or 12.

Spelt is a favorite grain in south Germany and Switzerland.

An Extinct Animal — Saber Toothed Tiger

1907

The Saber Toothed Tiger Was a Formidable Creature

The most remarkable of all the extinct feline animals are those known to naturalists as the saber toothed cats or tigers, a group comprising the greater part of all the fossil forms. They date back to the earliest times of which we know anything about the family in North America and reach down to the time of man himself.

A large and powerful species described from the Indian Territory by Cope lived contemporaneously with the hairy mammoth, as evidenced by the commingling of their skeletons. There can be little or no question but that the hairy mammoth was contemporaneous with man in North America as well as in Europe. Its geological range is from the close of the Eocene to the latter part of the Pleistocene.

The chief peculiarity of the animal is the extraordinary elongated canine teeth. The tail is of unusual length and the legs are short. The animal measures about seven feet in length aside from the tail. The lower jaws have a downward projection in front, due to a flange-like widening of the jawbones, which doubtless served as a protection to the teeth, preventing their injury or loss. In some of the larger forms from South America this flange was not present, while the canine teeth were even more elongated than is the case with this species, attaining a length of over six inches and protruding far below the jaws when closed.


A Chinese Solomon

Two Chinamen, brothers, well advanced in age, quarreled over a piece of land which they had jointly inherited from their father and went to law. The native magistrate heard the testimony on both sides and determined that both were wrong and both right, according to the different points of view. Therefore, instead of rendering a judgment in favor of either, he ordered that both be locked up in a cangue with their heads fastened face to face and kept there until they settled their quarrel. The cangue is a sort of cage in which prisoners are placed with their necks locked into a hole in a board. It resembles somewhat the stocks which were used for the punishment of malefactors in olden times. When the brothers were placed in the cangue, they were both very stubborn and indignant, but toward the end of the second day they began to weaken and on the third day reached a satisfactory settlement and were released.