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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 field floated a mile downhill carrying two cottages and trees, still standing upright.

Ground holding hundreds of Calabrian houses crossed a ravine; many trapped residents were dug out alive.

Women cooked potatoes over New Zealand steam vents; the traveller Angas called them capitally done.

Angas heard water boiling beneath the crust he walked on, where breaking through meant scalding death.

Small flies were seen running across the surface of boiling ponds ninety feet in circumference.

Rotorua houses built over hot springs sometimes collapsed, dropping dancing parties into the water below.

Idria's air carried so much mercury vapour that it frequently produced salivation in the miners.

In Idria's richest depths, quicksilver globules roll loose from broken earth onto the gallery floor.

Miners in that part of Idria worked four-hour shifts; elsewhere in the mine, eight.

Idria's mercury shipped abroad in iron bottles of sixty-eight pounds, and at home in sheep's skins.

Steller's sea cow wore hide an inch thick, scarcely able to be cut with an axe.

Instead of teeth, Steller's sea cow ground food between two horny plates built of innumerable tubes.

Cuvier recorded that the heart of Steller's sea cow was double.

The book calls Steller's sea cow little known; it had been extinct since 1768, eighty years.

A meteorite fallen in Yorkshire in December 1795 weighed fifty-six pounds and buried itself twenty-one inches.

The Villefranche meteorite of 1798 resembled a calf's head and smelled strongly of gunpowder.

At L'Aigle in Normandy, April 1803, a cloud burst and rained stones of five to seventeen pounds.

The L'Aigle stones landed so hot they burnt the first people who tried to lift them.