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Stones Too Hot to Pick Up
Fallen meteoric stones are hot when found, smell strongly of sulphur, and wear a black crust. A meteorite fallen in Yorkshire in December 1795 weighed fifty-six pounds and buried itself twenty-one inches. The Villefranche meteori…
Described as Little Known, Already Gone
The first Steller's sea cow ever seen was mistaken for a floating tree, black and knotty. 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…
Quicksilver That Rolls Out of the Rock
Visitors to the Idria quicksilver mines in Carniola descended 727 steps to reach the cinnabar. Idria's air carried so much mercury vapour that it frequently produced salivation in the miners. In Idria's richest depths, quicksilve…
Flies That Run on Boiling Water
Near New Zealand's Tongariro volcano, nearly a hundred boiling springs burst from one steep mountainside. Women cooked potatoes over New Zealand steam vents; the traveller Angas called them capitally done. Angas heard water boili…
The Ground That Went for a Walk
The 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…
The Horses That Never Saw Daylight Again
Poland's Wieliczka salt mine runs 6,000 feet east to west and reaches about 800 feet deep. Wieliczka is so vast the book calls it a city underground, with public roads inside it. A chapel is hewn from Wieliczka's salt rock, holdi…
The Laughing Mummies of the Puna
The 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 undec…
No Two Trees the Same
The Selva is the forested plain running west from the Amazon to the foot of the Andes, at least fifteen hundred miles across and, by the book's estimate, some six times the area of France. What the account finds most remarkable a…
The Evidence Arrived by Current
Before he sailed, Columbus had physical evidence that something lay to the west, and the Gulf Stream had delivered it to him. The current carried onto the shores of the Azores two things that did not belong there: pieces of bambo…
The Night London Chased the Sky
An aurora does not always appear as a clean arch of light. Sometimes it does not look like a sky phenomenon at all. The book records an occasion in London when the northern lights showed up as a broad low glow, exactly like the r…
Everyone Thought It Landed Next to Them
On 18 May 1710 a meteor crossed the sky over Leeds: broad at one end, narrow at the other, and travelling broad end first. People called it the flaming sword. Its light arrived so suddenly and so brightly that those standing bene…
The Safety Lamp That Was Not Safe
By the 1840s the miner's safety lamp was already a celebrated piece of British invention. The book is not impressed by it. It first sets out the scale of the problem: upwards of twenty thousand people lost their lives in the coal…
Found by Grabbing a Tree
The richest silver mine in South America was found by a man chasing something else. An Indigenous hunter named Hualpa was climbing the side of a mountain after a wild animal and caught hold of a tree to help himself up. The tree…
Fossil Ink
Country people in England called them thunderbolts: dart-shaped stones turning up in the fields, some under an inch long, some more than a foot. They are belemnites, and they are not stones at all. Each is the internal skeleton o…
The Petrified Wig
The 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 so…
The Island That Comes and Goes
Derwentwater in Cumberland has an island that is not always there. A section of the lake's peaty bottom rises to the surface from time to time, floats for a while, and later settles back down. The explanation the book offers is u…
Lisbon, Felt in a Derbyshire Mine
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 lasted six seconds in the city and threw down every church and large building in it. What is stranger is where else it surfaced. At Eyam Bridge in Derbyshire, the overseer of the lead mines was sitti…
Cold Water That Catches Fire
At Wigan in Lancashire there is a sulphureous spring that burns. Hold a lighted candle to the surface and a large flame springs up and burns vigorously, while the water itself stays perfectly cold. Earth soaked by the spring will…