“The Cardinal Espinosa, prime minister under Philip the Second of Spain, died, as it was supposed, after a short illness. His rank entitled him to be embalmed. Accordingly, the body was opened for that purpose. The lungs and heart had just been brought into view, when the latter was seen to beat. The cardinal awakening…
Slightly off-topic, but irresistible, from Henry Hiram Riley‘s pseudo-ethnography, Puddleford and its people (New York, 1854): Another amusement, frequent in the country, was the turn-out of the ‘Calathumpian Band.’ … No one knew exactly who its members were; but they were always on hand, soon after a wedding, in full uniform, with all their instruments…
The excerpt feature in Google Books sometimes delivers surreal gems, Escher stones. Here’s one from Advance Japan: A Nation Thoroughly in Earnest: “that the equivalent of the expression ‘not worth a button’ is, in Japanese, ‘not worth the head of a sardine.’ Mackerel also are extremely plentiful.” (I’m translating some mid-nineteenth century colloquial Flemish and…
I obviously don’t subscribe to this kind of over-familiar nonsense, but here anyway is Dickens in Household words (via Google Print) in 1856: There have not been wanting theorists who have recognised in the apparently constant opposition of the north and south a kind of natural law, by which both are destined to be regulated,…
OK, it was a mixture of bismuth powder with small quantities of vaseline, but what was it meant to do (late C19th) and what was its English name? (Lots of products at the end of the C19th were made by mixing powders with petroleum jelly (eg coal dust to make mascara). It might be unsafe…
From John Henry Pepper, The Playbook of Metals: Including Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper, and Tin Mines; With a Large Number of Interesting Experiments Relating to Alchemy and the Chemistry of the Fifty Metallic Elements (The Author reserves the right of translation) (London, 1861), chapter entitled The Tricks of the Alchemists: Another…
At one point in Marcel Carné’s 1939 realist drama (and Mussolini Cup nominee), Le jour se lève, François, the factory sand-blaster (Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. no. 379, 1925: “probably the most dangerous of all the mineral-dust hazards”), enters a variety hall where Françoise, his beloved, is preparing to make eyes…
I first came across their memory in a squat listening to Christy Moore’s song, Viva la quinte brigada, on the Ride on album. Here (via El bibliómano and JM Collado, who appears to have copied a whole load of the archive without adding anything of interest) is a collection of photos. Paradoxically, none of the…
Struggling with weariness and reading bits of Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones peruanas (1883). There was no sugar cane in Peru at the time of its conquest, he writes, and the first plantations were not established until 1570. The first Peruvian refiner suffered from the abundance and cheapness of Mexican sugar until he hit upon the smart…
