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....
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...
ViewSir Thomas Stamford Raffles, writing on the dugong from Sumatra, recorded a belief among Malay women that made the animal worth hunting for reasons that had nothing to do with its meat. A captured dugong calf, they held, always sheds tears for the loss of its mother, and those tears, if preserved, w...
ViewThe Calabrian earthquakes began on 5 February 1783 and continued until the end of that May. For a month the Calabrian earth stayed in tremor, moving sideways and beating upward by turns. Calabrian oxen and horses braced for each shock, standing with legs as wide apart as possible. One Calabrian fiel...
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...
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