“In July 1822, the wife of the man who superintends the decoy ponds in the parish of Great Oakley, near Harwich, took an egg from a hen’s nest, in which was a remarkable discolouration. She kept it about a week, and, upon breaking it, observed something within alive, which so alarmed her, that she let it fall, and ran for her husband who was close by, and immediately came, and found lying on the ground, surrounded with the contents of the egg, an animal of the lizard species alive, but incapable, from weakness, of getting away. The contents of the egg were fœtid, contained a very small portion of yolk, and with the albumen, not more than sufficient to half fill the shell. The animal proved to be a land swift, speckled belly, about four inches in length, nothing remarkable in its form, except its hind legs being longer than usual. It died shortly after being out of the egg. The man has it dried for the inspection of the curious.”

— Colchester Gazette, cited in The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824

German prodigy Jean-Philippe Baratier squeezed a lifetime’s work into less than two decades. Born in 1721 to a Huguenot minister near Nuremberg, he was polyglot from birth — his father spoke to him only in Latin, his mother in French, and the servants in High Dutch. By age 5 he was reading the Old and New Testaments in Greek and translating them into Latin and Hebrew. He matriculated at Altorf at 10, and three years later he was introduced to the king of Prussia and received into the Royal Academy. His interests expanded into navigation, astronomy, and history, including the Thirty Years’ War, the succession of bishops of Rome, and an inquiry into Egyptian antiquities. When he died at age 19, he left behind 11 published works and 26 manuscripts.

The ‘angry tree,’ a woody plant which grows from ten to twenty-five feet high, and was formerly supposed to exist only in Nevada, has recently been found both in eastern California, and in Arizona, says the Omaha Bee. If disturbed, this peculiar tree shows signs of vexation, even to ruffling up of its leaves like the hair on an angry cat, and giving forth an unpleasant, and sickening odor.

— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, 1892

Mr. Hardwood had two daughters by his first wife, the eldest of whom was married to John Coshick: this Coshick had a daughter by his first wife whom old Hardwood married, and by her had a son; therefore John Coshick’s second wife could say:

My father is my son, and I’m my mother’s mother;
My sister is my daughter, and I’m grandmother to my brother.

— The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824

A singular product of vitreous lavas is called in Hawaii ‘Pélé’s Hair.’ This silky, filamentous substance is described by Miss Gordon Cummings, in her latest book of travels, as ‘of a nigh olive-green or yellowish-brown color, and glossy, like the byssus of certain shells, but very brittle to handle.’ It is said to be produced by the wind catching the fiery spray thrown up from the crater, but the extreme fineness of its texture seems rather to suggest the action of escaping vapors within the lava itself. This view is strengthened by the circumstance that a perfect counterfeit is fabricated at ironworks by passing jets of steam through molten slag, when a material resembling vitreous cotton-wool, admirably adapted for packing fragile articles, results. The chief seat of its natural production is the great Hawaiian crater of Kilauea (personified as the fire-goddess Pélé), and it is found well adapted for nest-building by some inventive Hawaiian birds.

— Edinburgh Review, quoted in Bizarre Notes & Queries, May 1886

Here’s an odd, little-cited detail in the mystery of the Mary Celeste, the American brigantine found sailing unmanned in the Atlantic in 1872. John Austin, the marine surveyor who inspected the ship for the board of inquiry, reported:

On approaching the vessel I found on the bow, between two and three feet above the water line on the port side, a long narrow strip at the edge of a plank under the cat-head cut away to the depth of about three eighths of an inch and about one and a quarter inches wide for a length of about six to seven feet. This injury had been sustained recently and could not have been effected by weather or collision and was apparently done by a sharp cutting instrument continuously applied through the whole length of the injury. I found on the starboard bow but a little further from the stern of the vessel a precisely similar injury at the edge of a plank but perhaps an eighth or tenth of an inch wider, which in my opinion had been effected simultaneously and by the same means and not otherwise.

“As the Official Surveyor for this Court of Inquiry,” Austin concluded, “I must profess intense bewilderment as to the tool used to cut such marks and why they would have been cut in any vessel at these locations.”

So, what, was she attacked by sea monsters? Who knows?