61–70 of 72 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The deeper you plough this field, the more fruitful the findings. No dead end in sight. This may even take the cake. Dark and heavy Belgian cake. Cake of the dead, so to speak.
This sounds suspiciously close to the Anglican Inquisition . . .
I mean, there were plenty of poor people, and there's free stuff, so...
And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer. https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier
In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.
Close enough.
I think what's most surprising to me is that I didn't realize battlefield mass graves were actually so common in the past. At this scale it makes sense, but I had an idea from antiquity studies that war dead were expected to be brought home for burial. (That could also be untrue of antiquity tbh; burial was always an incidental topic.)
1800 is somewhat recent history (compared to year 1799 or -1). It is interesting that stuff like this gets forgotten in such short time frame and requires investigation/ discovery. It’s interesting to wonder, what common facts of today, will become mysteries for future historians.
There is a bad scan by google books of parts of the text written in German Fraktur, but on page 410 he's clearly talking about the English that started to collect bones from the battlefields to use as fertilizer in 1822.
https://books.google.de/books?id=PyRAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA410&lpg=P...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases Likely, but it seems they aren’t 100% sure of that at the Encyclopædia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/list/7-surprising-uses-for-mummie... : “It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Eg…
We know, anyway, that they used untold millions of cat mummies for locomotive fuel. In other news, Egyptians mummified millions of cats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To use on the english trains ?
If you're seriously asking, I highly doubt so. Great Britain has massive deposits of relatively clean, accessible coal. They are mostly in Wales but also in England and Scotland. Therefore there would be little reason to import any fuel from Egypt; over that distance, the steam ship would probably consume as many mummies as it was carrying.