Crested ducks are known to perform acts of cannibalism, mallards acts of necrophilia.
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One of the earliest known instances of wild carnivores being held in captivity in Mesoamerica dates to around the second century in Teotihuacán; excavations starting in the late 1990s uncovered the remains of almost two hundred animals—including wolves, eagles, and jaguars—in the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The skeletons showed bone breaks, bone fusion, and abnormal growths, as well as indications of a human-controlled diet.
Corporations, wrote Edward Coke in a 1613 legal decision, “have no souls,” for they are “invisible, immortal, and resteth only in intendment and consideration of the law.” A corporate body, Coke argued, can’t “do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear.”
Along with an elephant whose name in Arabic meant “the father of intelligence,” Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid presented Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne with a mechanical clock powered by water in 807. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows.
In the weeks surrounding Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, the minister of culture, eight of forty-one party regional leaders, fourteen of ninety-eight Luftwaffe generals, and eleven of fifty-three admirals committed suicide. In Berlin, 3,881 Germans killed themselves in April alone; 7,057 suicides were reported by the end of the year.
The Athenian orator Lysias, a generation younger than Antiphon—who pioneered the business of writing defense speeches—once upset a litigant, according to Plutarch, for whom he had prepared a defense, because the first time the man read the speech it “seemed to him wonderfully good, but on taking it up a second and third time it appeared completely dull and ineffectual.” After hearing the man out, Lysias replied, “Well, isn’t it only once that you are going to speak it before the jurors?”
For the treatment of “delirium and mania combined with shameless behavior,” ninth-century Persian polymath al-Razi offered a remedy by medical theorist Simʿun: “Bathe the patient’s head with a decoction of elecampane and sheep’s trotters, pour milk over him, put dung upon him, make him snuff sweet violet oil and breast milk, and feed him anything that is cold, fatty, and fills and moistens the brain.”
A seventeenth-century rabbinical decision tells of a German town in which wealthy Jewish households kept chickens, while poorer women secretly milked gentiles’ cows early in the morning to sell the purloined milk on the street. One time, some chicks hopped into a tub of milk left on a doorstep and drowned. “Each side suffered a financial loss,” the text reads. “One from the milk, the other from the drowned chicks.”
The astronomer and mathematician Thales of Miletus is believed to have been the first ancient Greek scholar to discuss the phenomenon of magnetism. Aristotle notes in On the Soul that Thales held the belief that “the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.” Five and a half centuries later, Diogenes Laërtius concurred with Aristotle, observing that Thales “attributed a soul or life even to inanimate objects.”
While aboard a ship on which a fire broke out, Ivan Turgenev as a boy in 1838 is purported to have shouted in alarm, “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.”
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s digestive “milk cure” involved drinking a half pint of milk every half hour for twelve hours, supplemented by bran and paraffin four times a day, fruit twice a day, and two enemas a day.
“Darkness has come upon me,” a hymn in the Rig Veda laments. “O Dawn, banish it like a debt.” The morning light is here asked, suggested translator Wendy Doniger, to act as a collection agency—to “make good what darkness had incurred or ‘exact’ the darkness from night as one would exact money.”
A 2011 study found that Chinese consumers are charged more due to “superstitious manipulations” of retail prices—fives and sixes appear more often than unlucky fours, eights and nines more than unlucky sevens. “Retailers,” the study reported, “are the clear winners.”
At the start of the French Revolution, the physician Jean-Paul Marat began publishing an antimonarchical journal in which he called the king’s minister of finance “the cruelest adversary of freedom.” In 1790 the Marquis de Lafayette dispatched thousands of soldiers to arrest Marat, even stationing them on rooftops in case Marat, an aviation enthusiast, attempted to escape by balloon. While the legality of the warrant was being disputed, Marat wrote and published a pamphlet mocking these extravagant efforts before making a quiet escape.
In order to halt or slow the advance of glaciers, the Tlingit tribe of the northwest coast of North America used to sacrifice dogs and slaves by throwing them into the glacier’s crevasses in the hopes of appeasing the ice spirit.