Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1892 — SOMEWHAT CURIOUS. [ARTICLE]

SOMEWHAT CURIOUS.

--Bellows Falls, in Vermont, has a 17-year-old giant. He is six feet eight inches tall and weighs 18-1 pounds. Denmark is the most drunken country in the world. Its yearly consumption of intoxicants is double that of Germany. In one. of the great Paris hospitals, out of eighty-three patients who suffered from epilepsy, sixty were found to be children of drunken parents. More men have died and are buried

in the Isthmus of Panama, along the line of the..proposed canal, than on any equal amount of territory in the world. Captain Baker, an engineer in the British service, published a book in 1877 which clearly proved, to his mind at least, that the end of the world would come on September 20, 1878.3 7' _ A citizen of Moberly, Mo., has a curious collection. He has a slipper old, a Bible and a trunk each one hundred years old, and a razor hone three hundred years old. The Patagonian lights his pipe, throws himself down with his face toward the ground, and swallows several mouthfuls of smoke in- a - manner which produces a kind of intoxication lasting several minutes. A Marion county, lowa, physician is the owner of a remarkable human monstrosity, a male child, sixteen inches long, weighing nine and onehalf pounds, its head the perfect counterpart of that of some gigantic serpent.

It is known that the hoofs of Korses were protected by boots of leather at a very early period in the world’s history—at a time which at least antedates Pliny and Aristotle, both of whom make mention of the fact. Several medical journals assert that the young women of the present day are better developed physi cally, taller, plumper, stronger and healthier than the young women of 50, 100, 150 or 200 years ago. A process 'has recently been discovered for making flour of bananas. Chemical experiments show that this flour contains more nutriment than rice, and that when eaten with beans, corn or sago it forms a very palatable and nourishing diet. At Cotta, in Saxony, persons who did not pay their taxes last year are published in a list which hangs up in all restaurants and saloons of the City. Those that are on the list can get neither meat nor drink at thes’e places, under penalty of loss of liGertrude Sonine, “• pretty girl o! 18 years, who lives in a town in Aroostook county, Maine, has never beer known to laugh, or even to smile While intelligent in other matters, she apparently cannot understand t joke, and is unmoved by the keenest witticisms. _