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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…
The Mouth That Cannot Swallow a Bread Roll
The Greenland whale reaches a hundred feet in length and cannot swallow anything much larger than a shrimp. Its throat measures "not exceeding an inch and a half in width" — so narrow, the book says, that the animal "would be cho…
A Charm Made of Tears
Sir 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 s…
A Book That Did Not Know Yet
Describing ships that become locked into drift ice and can neither advance nor retreat, the book adds that this "is supposed by some persons even now to be the case with the expedition under Sir John Franklin." That sentence was…
Where a Stone Is a Souvenir
A coral island contains no stone. It is built by polyps out of their own skeletons, topped with sand and cocoa-palms, and the few loose rocks ever found in its mud arrived by accident, drifted in on the ocean currents and, the bo…
The Lake You Can Farm in Summer
Every June, the Lake of Cirknitz in Illyria empties itself. The water drains away through fissures in its own basin, and the peasants move in behind it, sowing a crop on the lake bottom and pasturing herds on the rich herbage its…
Descent Into Antiparos
To reach the Grotto of Antiparos, a visitor descends roughly fifteen hundred feet below the surface, down three successive precipices, deeper with each stage. The grotto itself opens into a space some three hundred feet long and…
The Night the Sky Caught Fire
On 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…
Field Companion: Creatures of Sea, Sky, and Shore
Loudon on A walk through the book's mammals, birds, and fishes: Ask about the whale tribe, the birds of prey, or the chapter's stranger fish — answered only from what the book itself reports.
Field Companion: Wonders of the Earth
Loudon 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…
Social PostCoral Reefs Built an Island (No Architect Required)
Tiny coral animals build limestone skeletons, grain by grain. Generation after generation, a reef can grow until it reaches the surface. Given enough time, sand collects and plants take hold, creating dry land where there was onl…
Social PostThe Fastest Bird Alive (in 1848)
A falcon flown from Andalusia was found alive in Tenerife, roughly 752 miles away, about sixteen hours later. The account describes another long-distance flight: one of Henry II’s falcons escaped at Fontainebleau and was recaptur…
Social PostWhen the Prairie Becomes a River of Fire
A historical account describes prairie flames at night as brilliant chains of liquid fire across the grass. Along the Missouri, Platte and Arkansas river bottoms, dry grass burned fast enough to overtake a rider on horseback. The…
Social PostGiant's Causeway: Nature's Masonry
The Giant’s Causeway is made of thousands of basalt columns, fitted so closely that they have been compared to vertebrae. Cooling basalt cracks into these shapes wherever conditions are right. The same kind of formation appears a…