Invention and Discovery: Curious Facts and Characteristic SketchesAnonymous
History
Invention and Discovery: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches
Anonymous
Inventions
When the traveller, Ignatius Pallme, was at Kordofan, he saw in the
court of a house at Lobeid, a hyæna running about quite domesticated.
The children of the proprietor tamed it, took the meat thrown to it for
food out of its jaws, and put their hands even to its throat without
receiving the slightest injury. When the family sat down to dinner in
the open air, the animal approached the table, and snapped up the pieces
that were thrown to it, like a dog. A full-grown hyæna and her two cubs,
on another occasion, were brought to our traveller for sale; the latter
were carried in arms, as you might carry a lamb, and were not even
muzzled. The old one, it is true, had a rope round her snout, but she
had been led a distance of twelve miles by one man without offering the
least resistance. The Africans do not even reckon the hyæna among the
wild beasts of their country, for they are not afraid of it.
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NOVEL TRAVELLING CARRIAGE.
In 1838, a carriage was built for a gentleman at Kensington, which, for
completeness, equalled Sir Samuel Morland's celebrated cooking-carriage,
of the seventeenth century. It was divided into two apartments, an
anti-room, and a drawing-room and bed-chamber with every comfort. The
anti-room contained a table, drawers, and culinary utensils; and the
drawing-room was furnished with sofas, sofa-bedstead, six chairs, table,
cupboards, and a chandelier for nine lights; a stove and fuel. The
length of the carriage was twenty-nine feet, and the breadth nine feet;
and the length of the drawing-room twenty-feet. The whole weighed two
tons and a half.
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ENEMIES OF THE OSTRICH.
The ostrich would appear to be a bird of many enemies, from the
following statement in Sir J. E. Alexander's narrative of his Expedition
of Discovery in South Africa:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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