A grounded tour of Jane Loudon's Facts from the Wo…
The electric eel: a disabling shock on contact The torpedo ray: the same trick, a different fish The flying-fish: escape by leaving the water itself The porcupine-fish: defense by inflating into a ball of spines...
ViewLoudon on A walk through the book's mountains, caverns, and volcanoes: Ask about Peter Botte's Mountain, the Cheese Wring, the Peak of Teneriffe, the Giant's Causeway, the Grotto of Antiparos, prairie fires, or the Persberg mines — answered only from what the book itself reports....
ViewThe Andean Puna, a plateau 12,000 feet up, is called by the Spaniards the Despoblado. Puna winds cut the skin on face and hands, bringing thunder, lightning and snow daily for months. Travellers frozen on the Puna are found undecayed, faces contorted into a horrid appearance of laughter. The dry Pun...
ViewThe Giant's Causeway: thousands of basalt columns, mostly five-sided, fitting together so closely the book compares them to vertebrae. The same basalt-column formation appears at Fingal's Cave on Staffa — different island, identical natural process. The book notes similar columns turning up in South...
ViewThe dropping well at Knaresborough rises at the foot of a limestone rock, runs about sixty feet, then spreads over the brow of the rock and falls from thirty or forty separate places into a channel below. The rock overhangs by some fifteen feet, and each drop makes a small musical tinkling against t...
ViewOn the twelfth of October, eighteen thirty-three, at Hull, the night sky filled with light. A broad, irregular, semicircular belt of vivid white radiance spread overhead, bright enough to dim the fixed stars behind it. Witnesses described the light shifting and glowing, restless rather than still, h...
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