The Curiosity Cabinet

Beasts, birds, shells and trees at their most improbable

Fifteen volumes of natural history, mined for the facts that stop you cold: a snail with twenty-one thousand teeth, a lawsuit brought against ghosts, cowrie-shell money weighed out by the pound, a frog that purrs. Each links to the volume and entry it was drawn from.

"Showers of blood" explained: newly emerged butterflies discharge drops of red fluid on their first flight, and a mass emergence stains the ground. The book ties it to the Icelandic saga of Thorgunna (A.D. 1009), where a bloody rain fell only on the hay she had NOT claimed — she took to her bed and died, leaving a will whose non-execution caused deaths, hauntings, and finally a legal action of ejectment against the ghosts.Read it: Fairy Yellow
Cowrie shells as currency: in the Soudan a dollar's worth of goods cost 2,000 cowries — five to seven POUNDS of shells to carry. A young wife cost 60,000–100,000 cowries; an older wife, 20,000.Read it: Cowries — Part 1
Tyrian purple's recipe and price: the Tyrians ground the mollusks in rock hollows; Pliny specifies 111 Purpurae to 200 Buccina for the richest shade. Wool dyed in it was worth $200 a pound — "in the reign of Augustus one pound of wool dyed with Tyrian purple sold for about £36 sterling," so dyed fabrics "often cost their weight in gold."Read it: Family Muricidae — Part 1
Cicero paid ten thousand sesterces for a curly-maple table; one of the Ptolemies bought a maple table — 4½ feet across — for ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD, about $60,000. Workers in maple wood "ranked with jewellers and goldsmiths."Read it: Japanese Maples
Xerxes halted his entire army for days to admire a single plane tree, then had its likeness struck on a gold medal so he'd never forget it. The ancients also poured wine on plane-tree roots and hung the branches with jewels and gold.Read it: Sycamores — Part 1
The gypsy moth got loose from one man's window: a Cambridge, Massachusetts amateur let the surplus moths escape from his study. A million dollars had been spent trying to exterminate them by the time this book was written.Read it: Gypsy Moth
A single large New York daily newspaper eats 180 TONS of spruce paper per issue — 250 cords of wood. One year of that one order clears 18,000 acres of forest.Read it: Wooden Paper — Part 1
Diamond-back terrapin were priced by the half-inch: about $1 more per additional half-inch of shell; an eight-inch terrapin was worth $8, and a dozen of them $60 — at a time when a laborer made $1.75 a day.Read it: Mexican Mud Turtle·Diamond-back Terrapin
Restaurant fraud, 1900s: ordinary domestic ducks were fed wild celery, fattened, and served as "canvasback" at three to five dollars a plate — "no one, not even the epicure, can tell the difference."Read it: Canvasback
Aristotle taught that eels have no sex, no eggs and no semen, but rise from "the entrails of the sea." The belief held for nearly 2,000 years; Pliny's improvement was that young eels spring from the skin eels rub off against rocks.Read it: Common Eel
The buffalo's stupidity killed it: Hornaday's herd estimate was FOUR MILLION animals, yet a buffalo "would very often stand quietly and see two or three score or even a hundred of his relatives shot down before his eyes with no feeling than one of stupid wonder and curiosity."Read it: American Buffalo
Egg pirates of Labrador: three men made a business of first trampling every egg they found — because auks lay a replacement — so all their harvest would be fresh. In six weeks they collected THIRTY THOUSAND DOZEN eggs, worth about $2,000.Read it: Razor-billed Auk
Termite queens swell until the abdomen is "as big as a potato" — 20,000 to 30,000 times the bulk of a worker — laying sixty eggs a minute, upward of 80,000 a day. A listener's whispered comment: "What a fortune that would mean with eggs at twenty-five cents a dozen!"Read it: White Ants
Why white ants are called white ants: Dr. George Marx's line, quoted by the author — "they are called white ants because they are not ants and because they are not white."Read it: White Ants
Dragonflies are called "devil's darning needles," "snake feeders," "snake doctors," "flying adders" (Scotland) and "horse stingers" (England) — with matching beliefs that they sew up the ears of bad boys, sting horses, and act as physicians to water snakes.Read it: Dragon-flies
The grey pine has to be burned like a witch: in some districts women won't pass within ten feet of it, cattle near it are said to die, and a landowner who wants one gone dare not chop it — he builds a funeral pyre all around it.Read it: Pines — Part 1
English parents used to split a growing ash sapling, pass a ruptured baby through the gap twice, then bind the trunk — when the tree healed, they believed, so would the child.Read it: Ashes and the Fringe Tree — Part 1
The ash is Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree: its roots reached the underworld, its top held up the heavens, and the Fates dwelt at its base "continually watering the roots of this world-shadowing tree with honey-dew."Read it: Some Little Ashes
Millinery butchery: plume hunters evaded heron-protection laws by cutting the aigrette-bearing flesh from the back of the LIVING bird and leaving it to die — orphaning thousands of fledglings that starved.Read it: Great Blue Heron
In 1758 Benjamin Franklin handed out American apples in London; by 1845 Newtown pippins were selling to the English nobility at a guinea a dozen — forty-two cents an apple.Read it: Sycamores — Part 1
The Hessian fly is said to have arrived in the straw bedding of Hessian troops during the Revolution — and now costs American wheat growers millions of dollars a year.Read it: Gall-gnats
Pliny's headache cure: "a plaister made of slugs with their heads cut off," bound on the forehead. He also thought slugs were juvenile snails that hadn't grown shells yet.Read it: Land Slugs
The chank shell is the sacred shell of the Hindus and Travancore's national emblem — Vishnu holds one in every image, and a rare left-handed specimen is "worth its weight in gold." Chinese priests keep sinistral chanks in pagodas and give medicine to the sick from them.Read it: Family Turbinellidae
Belief follows the beak: the crossbill's twisted bill comes, in German legend Longfellow versified, from the little bird that tried to pull the nails from the Crucifixion and stained its feathers with blood.Read it: American Crossbill
"Halcyon days" is a kingfisher: the ancients held that halcyons built a floating nest at sea and calmed the waves while the eggs hatched.Read it: Belted Kingfisher
In Germany the Bohemian waxwing is said to appear only every seven years — and its visits are blamed for pestilence, exactly as an American comet or seventeen-year locust brood is.Read it: Bohemian Waxwing
The Canada lynx is the "lynx" of the ancients — the animal they believed could SEE THROUGH SOLID OBJECTS.Read it: Canada Lynx
Real kingfisher nurseries: the belted kingfisher's tunnel ends in a bed made entirely of the fish bones and scales its parents have coughed up — "a prickly cradle for the unhappy fledglings."Read it: Belted Kingfisher
The cone shell "glory of the sea" is one of the most expensive objects in natural history: Cuming's reef was swallowed by an earthquake shortly after his 1838 haul, fewer than a dozen specimens exist, one was valued at $500 in 1890, and six cones once averaged $100 apiece at auction.Read it: Cone Shells — Part 1·Family Conidae
A leopard frog PURRS: "he sings in low purring tones when water is poured gently on his back. He evidently likes it, and gives the same response that the cat gives when its fur is stroked."Read it: Engystoma Texense, Girard
The little southern tree frog changes costume so freely that at any given moment it may be any of a dozen colors — dark chocolate, purplish brown with spots, olive green, pea-green, greenish gray, fawn, or flesh color.Read it: Southern Tree Frog
A hornbill walls up his wife: the male seals the female into a tree hole with mud for the whole incubation, feeding her through a slot. "Should the male be killed it is a question whether or not the female could free herself."Read it: Birds' Nests and Eggs — Part 1
Bob-white eggs have been found thirty-seven to a nest, stacked in tiers with the small ends inward — and if the hen is killed after laying, the male takes over incubation entirely.Read it: Birds' Nests and Eggs — Part 1
Audubon counted OVER NINE THOUSAND chimney swifts clinging inside a single hollow plane tree in Kentucky; the birds fly up to a thousand miles in a day and never perch — they cling.Read it: Chimney Swift
American Indians call the fork-mosses "Women's heads" — "because when you trample them under foot they spring right up again."Read it: Fork-mosses
Pliny called the hairy-cap mosses "golden maiden-hair"; they were dedicated to Venus, later to the Virgin Mary, and boiled into a hair-strengthening wash.Read it: Hairy-cap Mosses
The monarch butterfly conquered the world by hitchhiking: probably crossing the Pacific in ships' cargo, it colonized Australia, then Java, Sumatra and the Philippines, has a foothold in southern England, is established in the Cape Verdes, and the author predicts Africa next. On the New Jersey coast in October, swarms halted by the ocean cover leafless trees so thickly they look in full leaf.Read it: Monarch
Butterfly weather-forecasting, western Pennsylvania: chrysalids hung under rails and limbs mean a rainy spell coming; chrysalids on open twigs mean dry, clear weather. A butterfly landing on your head means good news from a distance.Read it: Klug's Dircenna
The prong-horn — "easily the swiftest runners on the continent" — is killed by its own curiosity: a handkerchief waved on a stick will draw a herd within gunshot.Read it: American Prong-Horn
The wolverine poisons its own leftovers: it buries surplus meat and then so fouls the snow around it "that no other animal, no matter how hungry, will touch it."Read it: Wolverine
Bears study us back: black bears creep up under cover to watch people fishing or picking blueberries. "It is not at all unlikely that the bears in Northern New England are quite as well informed concerning the summer habits of men in those parts as we are concerning them."Read it: Black Bear
Ants farm aphids like cattle — driving off their enemies, carrying them to better pasture, and preparing new sites in advance of a migration. The trade name is exact: "the milch cows of the ants."Read it: Plant-lice
A wasp that fishes with the spider's own web: rather than hunt a well-hidden spider, Chalybion coeruleum deliberately tangles herself in the web; the spider rushes out to investigate, and the wasp frees herself and chases it down.Read it: True Bees — Part 1
The chigoe flea burrows headfirst into human flesh and swells there while discharging eggs; a related species buries itself in the EYELIDS of chickens.Read it: Fleas
Some aphis-lion larvae wear their victims: they cover themselves with the drained skins of the plant-lice they've killed, held in place by hooked hairs, until they cannot be recognized as insects at all.Read it: Aphis-lions
The Xenophoridae are "carriers of strangers" — mollusks that glue pebbles, dead shells and whole small shells to their own growing shell as camouflage, and are careful to set saucer-shaped ones convex-side-down so they don't catch on the ground.Read it: Family Xenophoridae
Sea silk: the byssus threads of the pen shell are combed, washed and spun by Sicilian country women into fabric "so soft as to rival the finest silks."Read it: Cloth of Gold
The scallop shell in heraldry started as a souvenir: a returning First Crusader stuck a pretty Palestine shell in his hat and set a fashion — the badge came to identify a man who had been to the Holy Land, and ended up in the arms of proud old families.Read it: Scallops — Part 1
Bideford's bridge and its mussels: the town council forbids anyone to take mussels there, believing the shellfish colonies hold the foundations against the tide — and mussel beds do act as natural breakwaters elsewhere.Read it: Family Mytilidae
Giant squid: bodies ten to fifteen feet with tentacles thirty to forty feet, and sucker disks "sometimes as big as dinner plates." The old Norse account has the kraken rising like a cluster of islands, with horns as high as a ship's masts.Read it: The Giant Squids
The Michigan grayling was wiped out by LOGGING, not fishing — the streams themselves were ruined by lumbering operations.Read it: Michigan Grayling
Connecticut's salmon were extinguished by one dam in 1798; when a single salmon turned up in 1872, the Saybrook fishermen no longer recognized what it was.Read it: Common Atlantic Salmon
The cod on the Massachusetts colonial seal, and on a Nova Scotia bank-note reading "Success to the Fisheries" — because Newfoundland cod was one of the chief reasons England colonized America at all.Read it: Common Codfish
The tilefish came back from the dead: after an apparent extinction, none could be found for years, then 8 fish in 1892, 53 the next year, 342 by 1898 — a full re-establishment.Read it: Tilefishes
A California jewfish is "a small-mouthed black bass lengthened out to 6 feet" — the one described tipped the scales at 347 POUNDS, with "a pair of eyes as large as those of an ox."Read it: White Perch
The Mediterranean umbrella shell, sized by comparison: its shell is "an absurdly small Chinese umbrella" over an enormous foot — like a leather disk covering the palm of a boxing glove.Read it: The Umbrella Shells
Buckthorn has the heaviest wood of any American tree — a cubic foot weighs 81.14 pounds, denser than water.Read it: Buckthorns
The tan-bark oak and the prickly ash are both being wiped out for their BARK — one by tanners, the other by people chewing it for toothache.Read it: Genus PASANIA, Orst. — Part 1·Family Rutaceae
A seven-acre French tract of hackberry produced 60,000 hay forks a year, worth $5,000 — and rocky worthless land is set apart by law for growing them.Read it: Genus CELTIS, Linn. — Part 1
The Franklinia mystery: William Bartram found the tree growing wild along the Altamaha in 1790, sent specimens to Philadelphia — and no one has ever found it wild again. Every living specimen descends from Bartram's.Read it: Family Theaceae
Ginseng economics: the Chinese revere its "man-shaped" root and pay fabulous prices believing it cures everything; American collectors have nearly exterminated the wild plant, so it is now farmed for export.Read it: Family Araliaceae
The aspen trembles, folklore says, because Judas hanged himself on it — and the same legend is attached to the redbud, called the Judas tree.Read it: Poplars — Part 1
"Oak apples" were the "apples of Sodom" and "Dead Sea fruit" of ancient writing — actually insect galls, laid one egg at a time inside a leaf.Read it: Oaks — Part 1
Eucalyptus grows a usable log in twenty years that would take an oak two hundred — and one California planter cuts a thousand cords a year off 200 acres indefinitely.Read it: Eucalyptus Plantations
Cheap wood outlives expensive wood: porous species like red oak and Cuban pine soak up preservative so much better that, treated, they outlast untreated white oak — beech's five-year life stretches to twenty-five.Read it: Wood Preservation — Part 1
Snail farming is real business near French cities; nineteen species of Helix are considered edible, sealed snails fetch 17 francs a thousand — and the "Roman snail," the commercial one, is "rarely eaten in England, strange to say."Read it: Land Snails — Part 1·Land Snails — Part 1
English country remedies collected from snail-keepers: live snails or slugs prescribed for consumption, anaemia, asthma, dropsy, eye troubles, rheumatism and corns.Read it: Land Snails — Part 1
A snail's mouth: the radula of a garden Pomatia carries TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND teeth in ranks, freely exhibited on a leaf of lettuce.Read it: Land Snails — Part 1
The violet snail stranding: a beach that had been clear at dusk was, by morning, piled shoe-top deep and knee-deep in hollows with millions of Ianthina — shell, animal and float all vivid purple.Read it: Violet Snails
The barn-owl newspaper hoax: "periodically a very old hoax is played on a credulous public by some newspaper reporter who declares that in such a town… a curious creature has just been caught, half-bird and half-monkey!"Read it: American Barn Owl
Golden plovers were sold in the streets of Chicago at FIFTY CENTS A HUNDRED, lured by dead birds propped on sticks and a dried pea rattling in a hollow reed to imitate their call.Read it: American Golden Plover
Sailors' superstition made real literature: the whole tangle of beliefs around storm petrels — birds of ill omen, harbingers of gales — is what Coleridge wove into "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Passengers shot them from ships to relieve boredom.Read it: Wilson's Stormy Petrel
The raven is understood without words: "people of all nationalities appear to understand that some dire calamity… is being announced every time the unbirdlike creature utters its rasping call" — and it gets blamed for every misfortune afterward. (Poe's "Nevermore," the book notes drily, "was, of course, a poetic license.")Read it: American Raven
Blackburnian warbler, per John Burroughs: it ought to be the orange-throated warbler, "but no, he is doomed to wear the name of some discoverer, perhaps the first who robbed his nest or rifled him of his mate."Read it: Blackburnian Warbler
Tree swallows were believed to hibernate in the MUD at the bottom of ponds all winter. The book's rebuttal is one sentence: "No bird's breathing apparatus is made to operate under mud."Read it: Tree Swallow
Silk in America: by the time this volume appeared, silk manufacture based on one small moth represented nearly a hundred million dollars of invested capital and employed 75,000 people.Read it: Bombyx Mori
A parasite that completes a whole generation in EIGHT DAYS — two days as egg, three as larva, three as pupa — and by doing so keeps the cotton caterpillar, a $15-million-a-year pest, from being a plague every year.Read it: Chalcis Flies — Part 1
Sharp's verdict on true bugs, quoted approvingly: "if anything were to exterminate the enemies of Hemiptera, we ourselves should probably be starved in the course of a few months."Read it: Plant-lice, Scale Insects, True Bugs, Etc
Bird-lice die when their host dies — even though they eat feathers, not blood. Kellogg's explanation: they can't survive the loss of the hen's body heat. After she dies they crawl slowly toward her head.Read it: Bird-lice
The male dobsonfly's inch-long crossed tusks look lethal and are useless as jaws — they exist only to hold the female during mating. The female's ordinary jaws, meanwhile, can draw blood.Read it: Dobson and Its Family — Part 1