The report comes from Tacoma that the cuticle of Tom Blanck, a desperado who was killed a few days ago, will be tanned and made into pocketbooks. While in jail in Seattle Blanck made a wooden imitation of a pistol, with which he held up the janitor and escaped. He was followed by the jailor and a posse and killed, as he would not surrender. Exactly how the pocketbooks will be disposed of is not stated, but judging from the results of several enterprises of this kind in the past, the owners of Blanck’s skin will have no difficulty in disposing of their manufactured stock. One of the inhuman practices brought to light by the investigation set on foot by General Benjamin F. Butler into the affairs of the Tewkesbury (Mass.) poorhouse was the skinning of dead patients and the making of souvenirs of various kings of the skins, for which the keepers or others in the scheme found a ready market. The same state of affairs is said to have existed at the Ohio State Prison, in Columbus, fifteen years ago. Prisoners were knocked in the head or shot on the slightest provocation by the keepers and guards, who were all banded together for the traffic in human skin souvenirs. These outrages finally became so flagrant that an investigation was held, which resulted in the turning out of all the keepers and guards in the prison. None of the men were ever prosecuted, as it was impossible to get tangible evidence. There must have been money in this human skin traffic or the men engaged in it would not have taken such chances. There are many persons whose morbid tastes make them delight in the possession of just such grewsome souvenirs and it is not infrequent that some man of a reckless, roving disposition and a checkered past is seen proudly displaying a tobacco pouch, purse or other “pocket novelty” made from the skin of a human being.

The Arena, Volume 4, Issue 2 (July 1891), edited by B. O. Flower

Thanks to Richard J. Shiffer for post processing this issue!

That belief the Chinese have in the remedial qualities of substances forming a part of the human body seems to be irradicable, says the New York Times. Thinking that Europeans still held the same ideas led as much as anything else to the Tien-Tsin massacres of twenty-five years ago. Prehistoric man drank from a human skull, believing that the uncanny goblet had a certain potency. Not so long ago the skull of a suicide was used in Caithness as a drinking-cup for the cure of epilepsy. Cases have been cited where superstitious people, within the last thirty years, have dug up bodies so as to possess themselves of skulls for the same purpose. As late as 1678 in the official pharmacopoeia of London College of Physicians mention is made of the skull of a man who had died a “violent death.” For centuries in the past, for the manufacture of certain quack nostrums, notably an ointment, ground skulls were used. The medical books of Nuremberg of 200 years ago always cite mumia–or the embalmed flesh of mummies–as a sovereign cure for certain diseases. The Egyptian mummy was a specific for one malady, the Teneriffe mummy for another. Excluding all the other strange substances employed in early medicine, there is a trace of cannibalism in the used of these mummied substances. It has been shown that cannibalism does not arise in all cases from hunger, but that to heat human flesh is a religious rite and favored by the gods. In some remote manner it has something to do with sacrifice. Describing superstitions, the fact is cited that to-day Irish peasants use skulls to hold water in under the belief that the water thus becomes curative.

The quaint little town of St. Nicholas, in East Flanders, boasts the possession of two children of such extraordinary abnormal growth as to put completely in the shade all similar infant prodigies of the past or present. These veritable Brobdignagian youngsters are boy and girl. The leder, Master Clement Smedst, is 15 years of age and weighs no less than 420 pounds (30 stone); the circumference of his body is 6 feet 6 inches; he measures 36 inches around the leg and 28 inches around the arm. His sister Bertha, is 8 years old, and turns the scale at 224 pounds (16 stone). In spite of their enormous dimensions their activity is remarkable, for they trip and skip about with all the agility of other children their age. It is an astonishing sight to see these infant mountains of humanity romping about in country lanes with other children of the village. One would imagine them to be the offspring of a race of giants, so high do they tower over the heads of their little playfellows. Their appearance is decidedly interesting, both having extremely handsome and regular features. Bertha, like other girls of tender years, delights in nursing a doll, which seems ludicrously out of place and proportion in the arms of the young giantess. The couple are attracting the attention of the country around, and on fine days crowds of people flock into the quiet little town in order to catch a glimpse of these colossal children.

Coryell Bartholomew, the Jackson aeronaut, proposes to go over the falls of Niagara on a trapeze attached to a bar between two balloons. The contrivance resembles a huge dumb bell. The connecting shaft is 100 feet long, and each sphere is 40 feet in diameter, leaving 20 feet between them. The contrivance will be ballasted so as to keep from sailing into the air as it floats down the river, but when the precipice is reached the ballast will be gradually released. At the bottom of the falls Bartholomew expects to sail away. If no obstacles develop, the trip will be made in August, 1896.

A French archaeologist, traveling among the Andes in search of knowledge and specimens, had a great desire to explore some of the caves in the sides of the precipices. They were doubtless ancient tombs and would probably yield him a treasure. He selected a favorable spot therefore, rigged a sort of chair or seat between two leather cords, and engaged two Indians to let him down from the brow of the precipice. “A descent of 300 feet made in this way,” he tells us, “is extraordinarily long.” However, he reached the cave in safety, and on forcing a passage into it was rewarded by finding two skulls and a mummy–”thoroughly dry,” he says, “and pretty solid.” He passed a string through the eyeholes of the skulls and attached them to his belt. Then he took the mummy in his arms and signaled to the Indians to draw him up. With his heels he defended himself against the jutting rocks and in a few minutes was almost on a level with the top. The Indians knew nothing about his load. Just then the yellow skull of one of their ancestors appeared before their eyes and the idiots gave a start of surprise. The Frenchman thought they must have let go the cord.

“It was the affair of a second,” he writes. “What passes in the brain of a man at such an instant is indescribable. I did not drop a yard, but I experienced all the horror of a man in rapidly falling through space. My hands let go the mummy, and while covered with a cold sweat, I was helped over the edge of the cliff by the Indians the mummy bounded from rock to rock and landed in bits at the bottom of the chasm.”

He overwhelmed the Indians with invectives, but to no purpose. Such dead men, they assured him, if disturbed in their sepulchers, had the habit of kissing the Indians, who perished infallibly under their deadly breath. One of the two declared that his own father had died in that way. The other assured the Frenchman that at the moment when the head of the mummy showed above the edge of the rocks it opened its mouth. If it had not luckily fallen into the abyss it would have cursed them forever.

The story of “Lalla Rookh,” as told in the delightfully romantic poem of the Orient by Tom Moore, will be exploited in the pyrotechnic carnival which is to celebrate the opening of The Detroit Railway lines at Boulevard Park, 14th Avenue and the Boulevard, Detrot, beginning Tuesday, July 23. Lalla Rookh, as the readers of Tom Moore will remember, was the daughter of the powerful Arungzebe. As the time in which the story opens she was betrothed to the youthful king of Lesser Bucharia. The king had fallen in love with the heroine while visiting at her father’s court, where he was entertained in a style of magnificent hospitality. The young king goes back to his home and Lalla Rookh is to follow him. The day of her departure from Delhi was a day of the most gorgeous celebration and it is here that the story of the pyrospectacle opens. Setting forth from Delhi, in magnificently equipped barges and surrounded by the flotilla upon the Jumna, the action of the piece opens in a blaze of light. Upon the waters of the lake, which has been constructed at the park, the flotilla will set sail, attended by the feast of the roses, and Oriental custom of much beauty. The lake has been so prepared that it will represent, as correctly as may be, all the aisles and shores of the Persian Gulf and standing out in bold relief in the background will be the temples and alters of the fire worshippers. Volcanos in full eruption will illuminate the far distance. Each step in Moore’s story up to the time she meets the unknown Casmerean poet and is enchanted will be followed as told in the romance. Her desire to flee the court with the poet rather than marry the king is the climax of dramatic action. Into the story are introduced the tragic elements which Moore so graphically told and the happy denouement when the princess recognizes in the king the poet to whom her first maiden’s love has been given. With such a story, environed by all the wealth of gorgeous pyrotechnic display that the great master, Pain, is capable of, will the visitors to Boulevard Park be entertained on the carnival nights of The Detroit Railway. Already the amphitheatre approaches completion, the vast stage is ready for its twelve tons of scenery, the great lake has been flooded and the chorus and accessories numbering some three hundred people, are in training. Hundreds of workmen have been busy for weeks completing the double track line which The Detroit Railway has built to its park and by July 20 the last stroke of preparation will have been made and the pyro-spectacle ready for its guests. Parties intending to visit Boulevard Park and desiring seats in any particular portion of the grand stand will do well to notify Manager G. E. Raymond, 719 Chamber of Commerce Building, of their intention, that he may reserve accommodations for them. The first performance will be given July 23 and repeated every Thursday and Saturday night thereafter until August 10, with a grand special performance August 7.

When Messrs. H. A. Everett and Albert Pack of The Detroit Railway, promised last November to have cars running in Detroit by July 1 the people were incredulous, as they did not know Messrs. Everett and Pack or their ability to accomplish the seemingly impossible. They had been accustomed to the old foggy method of the other lines and this was the basis of their doubt. The Detroit press of last week told how thoroughly they kept their promise and when the same two men promise a pyrospectacle of great magnificence, to celebrate the opening of their lines, that promise must be believed. The pyrospectacle, “Lalla Rookh,” which is to be given in Detroit, is now running in Cleveland and has won for itself the utmost of praise from the Cleveland papers. All kinds of superlative adjectives have been used their [sic] to describe its bewilderingly beautiful setting, tis graceful dances, its thrilling pyro-technical features and the perfection of detail and ensemble which marks the production. To properly celebrate the opening of The Detroit Railway will Tom Moore’s Oriental romance “Lalla Rookh,” environed by all the skill an thrilling accessories that the great Pain can invent, be brought to Detroit and presented on Boulevard Park, 14th and Avenue and the Boulevard, beginning July 23.