STRANGE FREAKS OF NATURE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 294, 5 September 1908, Page 11

STRANGE FREAKS OF NATURE.

4 The recent law case in Australia to decide the possession of a two-headed baby serves to recall the fact that human nature has always found a certain morbid satisfaction in the spectacle of freaks. Many very tall stories have found credence, in consequence of that. Mr. Philip Luckombo, who made a tour of Ireland. ever so long ago, wroto from Cork, in 1783:-

"Among otlior things I was liore shown a set of knives and forks, whose handles .were made of a bony substance, or excrescence, that grew out of the heels of tho wonderful ossified body of the man I saw in Trinity College, Dublin; he was a liativo of this place. These bones grew in tho form of a but much larger, as you may easily imagine, since the handles aro of a common size. They were nol sawed off, but fell yearly, like the horns of a stag, without any force, or pain to the limbs that bore them. Tlioy were well polished, and of a very hard substance, oqual to ivory, though not so white." A man who grew horns on his heels had at least the merit of originality among tho freaks. Of other freaks—giants and dwarfs and Imman ostriches and all tho rest of it—there have been, and aro still, a tedious multitude. But perhaps tho strangest freak now surviving is the man who will drink any other tea from choice once lie has tasted Suratura. As his name and address have not yet been discovered, tho story of his existence is probably a canard. Suratura lea is a delight to (he palato anil a support to tho nerves. It is tho selected leaf of the finest garden of Ceylon, 1