STRANGE FREAKS OF NATURE.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 318, 3 October 1908, Page 11

STRANGE FREAKS OF NATURE.

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 Luckombe, who made a tour of Ireland over so long ago, wrote from Cork, in 1783:"Among other things I was hero shown a ' sot of knives and forks, whose handles were mado of a bony substance, or excrescenco, that grew out of tho heels of tho wonderful ossified body of the man I saw in Trinity College, Dublin; he was a native of this place. These bones gTew in tho. form of a cock's-spur, but much largor, as you may easily imagine, since the handles aro of,a common size. They were not sawed off, but fell yearly, like tho horns of a stag, without any force, or pain to the limos that bore them. They were well polished, and of a very hard substance, equal to ivory, though not so white." A man who gre,w horns on his heels had at loast tho merit of originality among the freaks. Of other freaks—giants and dwarfs and human ostriches and all tho rest of it—there have beon, and are still, a tedious multitude. But porhaps the strangest freak now surviving is the man who will drink any other tea from choico once he has tasted Suratura. As his namo and address have not yot been discovered, tho story of his existenco is probably a canard. Suratura tea is a delight to the palate and a support to tha nerves, It is the eolccted leaf of tlio finest gordon of Coylon. 1,