WHO’LL BUY WALRUS WHISKERS.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 48, 20 July 1908, Page 2

WHO’LL BUY WALRUS WHISKERS.

ODD GOODS AT QUEER PRICES.

Hamburg to the great market' for wild animals, but there are natural history shops in London where you may buy almost any bird, beast, or insect alive or dead. The catalogues of such firms are absolute curiosities. What, for instance, can anyone want with live earwigs, quoted at two shillings a dozen, crickets at the same price, and ant-lions at fivepence apiece ?

At these shops you may fill your pockets with bumble bees at threepence apiece ; wasps—all alive and stinging, oh !—are to be purchased at the same rate; but horse-flies, possibly because of their extremely poisonous qualities, are quoted at fivepence. Fine large bull-frogs, the same whose legs form a dish beloved of our American cousins, are twelve shillings a dozen ; and alligators, very smafll but extremely lively, may be purchased for as little as five shillings apiece. Paris has now a shop for the sale of the hair of famous people. Every lock is guaranteed genuine, and no less than four pounds is requested for a mere snippet from the head of the great Napoleon. The hair of certain Popes rules steady at about two pounds a lock, but' it is possible to secure a wisp from the hair of the Tsar or the Kaiser for as little as five francs.

There is an old curiosity shop in London which makes a speciality of i heathen* deities. All kinds of images, ! small and large, handsome, hideous, and grotesque are on view. You can choose an antique Aztec god from Mexico, carved in heavy stone and hideous enough to scare a burglar ; you can purchase a marble deity ; from Mandalay, a wooden atrocity from the Ju-Ju land of West Africa, j or a gilt joss from a Chinese temple. | .Your taste may perhaps lie in the | direction of antiques. There was rej cently offered at auction in King St., j Covent Garden, a marvellous collec- ; tion of mummies, most of them of j Peruvian origin. They went very i cheap. A withered old gentleman \ and his grey-haired wife, who had led a highly-civilised existence in days when our ancestors pranced j through Britain’s primeval forests | attired in blue dye, fetched but a ! beggarly two pounds apiece. A boy went for thirty shillings only, and a lady, who had been found walled u up i presumably buried alive, was sold | for three pounds. At the same sale ; there was put up the complete outfit |of a certain Congo medicine-man, who admitted at his trial at Boma j that he had killed over one thousand j persons. This was sold for eight guineas. I Another remarkable curiosity which. | was for sale at a similar auctiqn j was a piece of the hide of a mylodori i or giant sloth, an animal which was I rather larger than an elephant, and which has been extinct for a good many thousands of years. The hide was found in a cave in the Andos, and fetched no less than £7O per square inch.

Nature has armed the walrus with bushy whiskers of amazing stiffness. These, when dried, form the most perfect of natural toothpicks, and quite an industry has grown up in their collection and sale. They are expensive, costing, wholesale, a penny apiece. The chief market is in China where a walrus whisker set in silver is the cqrrect thing for a Chinese swell.

There are many curiosities connected with the drug trade. Some of the drugs are enormously costly. Aconitine, which is one of the most deadly poisons in existence is £27 an ounce. Anqther poison known as daturine fetches £l6 the,; ounce. You can buy pure rattlesnake venom or the poisqn of the hooded cobra if you are prepared to pay for it. The former is said to be used as a medicine in cases of malignant scarlet fever.

j Powdered cockroach savours of the j pharmacopoeia of the .Middle Ages, ! but is still, we believe, prescribed in , dropsy ; and the whqlcsaile chemist j will v also supply the South American j arrow poison, curarine, at the moder- | ate price of £7O the ounce. —“An- ! swers.”