One day I paid him a visit [an orangutan at the Paris Zoological Gardens], accompanied by an illustrious old gentleman, who was a clever, shrewd observer. His somewhat peculiar costume, bent body, and slow, feeble walk at once attracted the attention of the young animal, who, while doing most complacently all that was required of him, kept his eyes fixed on the object of his curiosity. We were about leaving, when he approached his new visitor, and, with mingled gentleness and mischief, took the stick which he carried, and pretending to lean upon it, rounding his shoulders, and slackening his pace, walked round the room, imitating the figure and gait of my old friend. He then gave him back the stick of his own accord, and we took our leave, convinced that he also knew how to observe.

— M. Flourens, quoted in Ernest Menault, The Intelligence of Animals, 1869

In 1855 the Western Lancet published a letter from an officer in the Crimea:

A curious thing occurred yesterday. A sapper was brought from the trenches with his jaw broken, and the doctor told me that there was a piece of it sticking out an inch and a half from his face. The man said it was done by a round shot, which the doctor disbelieved, but the poor fellow insisted, and said, ‘Yes, and it took off the head of the man next me.’ This was conclusive, and the surgeon proceeded to remove the bone: it came out easy, when the doctor said to the man, whose face appeared to preserve its form pretty well, ‘Can you move your jaw?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ was the reply. The doctor then put his finger into the man’s mouth, and found the teeth were there, and at length assured the soldier that it was no jaw of his that was broken, but that of his headless comrade, inflicting a severe but not dangerous wound. Upon this, the man’s visage, which had been rather lengthened, rounded up most beautifully.

Reprinted in Paul Fitzsimmons Eve, A Collection of Remarkable Cases in Surgery, 1857.

When actor Conrad Cantzen died in 1945, he left $226,608.34 in a special fund to enable performers to buy new shoes each year.

“I leave the Conrad Cantzen Shoe Fund for the people who can’t buy shoes, even if they are not paid-up members of Equity,” his will read. “Many times I have been on my uppers, and the thinner the soles of my shoes were, the less courage I had to face the managers in looking for a job.”

Remarkably, the fund is still running. If you work in entertainment, are currently unemployed, belong to a performing arts union, and haven’t already applied in the past year, the Actors Fund will reimburse you up to $40 toward a pair of shoes costing no more than $100. Details are here.

A third case is one of somnocyclism (cycling in sleep). The patient, asleep, sometimes in cycling costume, and sometimes in an undershirt or less, got up, mounted his wheel, and rode about town and in the country. He generally awoke from a fall. On one occasion it was at the foot of a hill, his head on the edge of a pond, and his wheel about thirty feet distant. Another night he found himself suspended by his shirt on a pear tree in his father’s garden. It is not known whether he had descended thither from the roof or was trying to ascend. At other times he would go to his office and work. Once, having stuck over a balance in the afternoon, he found next morning that he had completed it, correcting an error previously not observed. There is no subsequent recollection of what has transpired. He has been observed in hospital to hold a conversation through an imaginary telephone, and again to sit atop a wardrobe with an umbrella up over him. Evidently this man’s disease included a sense of humour.

— G.R. Wilson, “Alcoholism and Allied Neuroses,” Journal of Mental Science, October 1899

Time and weather have sculpted a likeness of George Washington in Colorado’s Roxborough State Park. It even has “teeth.”

Right: A profile discovered near South Bethlehem, Pa., during the clearing of a mountainside in 1913. “Viewed in profile, the nose, upper lip, eye, and chin are as clearly defined as though cut by human agency,” wrote one observer. “Even the rock formation of the head has a surface curiously like in appearance to the wigs of colonial days.”

During an Air Force training mission over Montana on Feb. 2, 1970, Gary Foust’s F-106 entered an uncontrollable flat spin at 35,000 feet.

He rode it down to 12,000 feet, ejected — and watched as the plane righted itself, descended into a snowy field, and made a gentle belly landing. Its engine was still running when the police arrived.

After repairs, the fighter was returned to service in California and New York. Today it’s on display in a museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

When I lived at Durham, I was walking one evening in a park belonging to the Earl of Stamford, along the bank of a lake where fishes abounded. My attention was turned towards a fine jack of about 6 lbs., which, seeing me, darted into the middle of the water. In its flight it struck its head against the stump of a post, fractured its skull, and wounded a part of the optic nerve. The animal gave signs of ungovernable pain, plunged to the bottom of the water, burying its head in the mud, and turning with such rapidity that I lost it for a moment; then it returned to the top, and threw itself clean out of the water on to the bank. I examined the fish, and found that a small part of the brain had gone out through the fracture of the cranium.

I carefully replaced the shattered brain, and, with a small silver tooth-pick, raised the depressed parts of the skull. The fish was very quiet during the operation; then I replaced it in the pond. It seemed at first relieved, but after some minutes it threw itself about, plunged here and there, and at last threw itself once more out of the water. It continued thus to act many times following. I called the keeper, and, with his assistance, applied a bandage to the fracture. This done, we threw the fish into the water, and left him to his fate. The next morning, when I appeared on the bank, the pike came to me near where I sat, and put his head near my feet! I thought the act extraordinary, but taking up the fish, without any resistance on its part, I examined the head, and found that it was going on well. I then walked along the banks for some time; the fish did not cease to swim after me, turning when I turned; but as it was blind on the side where it was wounded, it appeared always agitated when the injured eye was turned toward the bank. On this, I changed the direction of my movements. The next day I brought some young friends to see this fish, and the pike swam towards me as before. Little by little he became so tame that he came when I whistled, and ate from my hand. With other people, on the contrary, it was as gloomy and fierce as it always had been.

— “Dr. Warwick,” anecdote read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, 1850, quoted in Ernest Menault, The Intelligence of Animals, 1869