A common belief in antiquity was that bees were born of decaying ox flesh. Virgil instructs in his Georgics to stop up a young bullock’s nostrils and mouth, beat it “to a pulp through the unbroken hide,” shut the carcass in a small room to ferment, and await the bees that will burst out “like a shower pouring from summer clouds.”
Archive
Miscellany
Accounts varied of the Great Famine of 1315–22, during which more than 10 percent of Europe’s population died. In Flanders: “Parents killed their children and children killed parents, and the bodies of executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows.” In France: “There was no wine in the whole kingdom.”
While on his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Leadville, Colorado, where he went into a saloon. There was a piano player in the corner with a sign over him that said: DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He also visited a nearby mine where, upon reaching the bottom, the miners implored him to stay for supper: “the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”
While on his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde drank elderberry wine with Walt Whitman; saw Niagara Falls, later noting, “Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life”; read aloud passages from Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography to miners in Colorado; and witnessed a lynching in Louisiana.
A late nineteenth-century concern for the nerve-racking speed of modern life prompted neurologist George Beard to introduce the term neurasthenia for a sickness whose symptoms include headaches, anxiety, impotence, insomnia, and lack of ambition. The condition was so prevalent in the United States that William James—who received the diagnosis along with his sister, Alice—referred to it as Americanitis.
“I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby,” Saint Augustine reports in his Confessions. “He could not speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk.” Regarding the baby’s sinister intent, Augustine contends that “it can hardly be innocence,” when the milk “is flowing richly and abundantly, not to endure a share going to one’s blood brother, who is in profound need.”
Having come to the U.S. through Portugal, French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated part of The Little Prince—one of the best-selling works of fiction of all time—in a twenty-two room mansion on Long Island in 1942. “I wanted a hut,” he reflected, “and it’s the Palace of Versailles.”
The earliest recorded process of silver extraction occurred in first-century-bc China by an alchemist named Fang, who devised a secret procedure for boiling off mercury and leaving behind pure silver residue. After her husband tortured her in order to learn her secret, and as she was possibly suffering from mercury poisoning, she went insane. Ten centuries later a girl named Geng Xiansheng was summoned to the emperor’s palace to transform mercury and “snow” into silver. “She mastered the art of the yellow and white [alchemy],” wrote one historian of Geng, “with many other strong transformations, mysterious and incomprehensible.”
Herodotus wrote that whenever an important decision was to be made by Persian men, they discussed the matter when drunk. The next day, the consensus they reached was reexamined when sober. If it was still amenable, the motion passed; if it wasn’t, it was scrapped. “Conversely,” Herodotus continued, “any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterward when they are drunk.”
“But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?/It speaks, and yet says nothing.” An apt description of TV, Marshall McLuhan said, when he quoted Shakespeare in Understanding Media. Romeo’s line is in fact “She speaks, yet she says nothing,” and refers to Juliet, who is likened to light—and it actually occurs in the play ten lines after the first.
“If ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act of God,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness, and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind.” The sentence ends the first paragraph of his 1912 essay “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic.”
In 1978 NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais predicted that the number of artificial satellites in low earth orbit might reach such density as to spark a cascade of collisions. The resulting debris belt would eventually make some orbits nearly impassable. “Under certain conditions,” they wrote, “the belt could begin to form within this century and could be a significant problem during the next century.”
During the rule of Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Carolingian Renaissance saw the revival of Latin studies, the creation of a royal scriptorium, Alcuin’s revision of the Vulgate Bible, and the advent of a minuscule (lowercase) writing system, which eased the labor of copying. Charlemagne himself, however, could barely write a word in any language.
“There is a story, repeated by a number of Roman writers,” explained the classicist Moses Finley, “that a man—characteristically unnamed—invented unbreakable glass and demonstrated it to Tiberius in anticipation of a great reward. The emperor asked the inventor whether anyone else shared his secret and was assured that there was no one else; whereupon his head was promptly removed, lest gold be reduced to the value of mud.”
In Dialogue on Miracles, the thirteenth-century preacher and historian Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of a man curious to discover the origin of the migratory swallows that appeared at his house every spring. Catching one of them, he attached a note to its leg that read, “O swallow, where do you live in winter?” The following spring, a bird appeared with a reply attached to its leg: “In Asia, at Peter’s house.”