Fact Book

12672. Gland
Gland : islets of langerhans
Hormone : insulin (beta cells) glucagon (alpha cells).

12673. Gland
Gland : stomach duodenum
Hormone : gastrin secretin cholecystokinin (pancreozymin).

12674. Gland
Gland : kidney ovary
Hormone : renin oestrogens(17 beta-oestradiol) progesterone.

12675. Gland
Gland : corpus luteum
Hormone : progesterone and oestrogen.

12676. Gland
Gland : placenta
Hormone : chorionic gonadotrophin human placental lactogen.

12677. Gland
Gland : testis
Hormone : testosterone.

12678. History Facts
In France in the late 1600s, it was considered a great honour to talk to King Louis XIV while he was on the lavatory.

12679. History Facts
In Anglo-Saxon times, shepherds were given twelve days' worth of cow manure at Christmas.

12680. History Facts
In 896, the rotting body of Pope Formosus was removed from his coffin, dressed in his papal robes and put on trial. Found guilty, his blessing finger was cut off and he was thrown in the river.

12681. History Facts
The body of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham was preserved and kept in an open wooden box which is still on display in University College, London. For many years, Bentham was brought out to attend special functions and meetings.

12682. History Facts
Roman gladiator and slave rebel leader Spartacus had 300 of his followers crucified to show the others what would happen to them if they deserted his army.

12683. History Facts
During the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, 17,000 people were beheaded using the guillotine.

12684. History Facts
The Scottish bagpipes were originally made from the entire skin or stomach of a dead sheep.

12685. History Facts
Russian leader Peter the Great had a museum in which he kept the stuffed bodies of deformed people and animals, such as a child with two heads and a sheep with five feet. The museum was looked after by a deformed dwarf who knew he would become an exhibit when he died.

12686. History Facts
It took the executioner three blows to behead Mary Queen of Scots in 1567.And he still had to saw through the remaining skin and gristle with a knife.

12687. History Facts
In Ancient Egypt, a flea-catcher would cover himself in milk and stand in the middle of the flea-infested room until all the fleas jumped onto him then he'd leave, taking them all with him.

12688. History Facts
English hatmakers used to soften the straw they plaited into hats by spitting on it.

12689. History Facts
In the 1800s, there were several cases of people being buried when not really dead. Terrible stories about opened coffins with scratch marks on the inside, and corpses with fingernails worn away by trying to escape, led to cautious people being buried with a system of warning bells fitted in the coffin which they could ring if they woke up.

12690. History Facts
During witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, in 1692, 25 people were condemned to death on the flimsy evidence of a group of hysterical girls.

12691. History Facts
King Kokodo of the Congo ruled for three years after his death. His body was wheeled around in a box during this part of his reign…

12692. History Facts
Leather used to be cured with a mixture of dog and chicken faeces smeared on it for many months. The fat and rotting meat scraps were scraped off with a knife.

12693. History Facts
It is said that the cursed mummy of Egyptian princess Amen-Ra was on board the Titanic when it sank in 1912, killing 1,500 people.The mummy was being sent from the British Museum to the USA; only the lid of the mummy's coffin is still in the British Museum.

12694. History Facts
Bald Romans used to make a paste of mashed up flies and spread it over their heads in the belief that it would make their hair regrow. It didn't…

12695. History Facts
Ivan the Terrible of Russia punished a bishop by having him stitched into the skin of a dead bear and releasing a pack of hounds to hunt and kill him.

12696. History Facts
Instead of a hollow pumpkin with a candle inside, Celtic people are said to have used real human heads cut from defeated enemies to keep away ghosts and ghouls in the autumn.

12697. History Facts
Chimney sweeps used to have three baths a year – one in the spring, one in the autumn and one for Christmas.The rest of the time, they were covered in soot.

12698. History Facts
In the past, European women sometimes wore a tube filled with sticky tree sap around their necks or on animal fur.These were supposed to attract and trap any fleas on their bodies.

12699. History Facts
The earliest cosmetic surgery was practised by doctors in India who made fake noses for criminals who had their noses cut off as a punishment for their crimes.

12700. History Facts
If sheep grazed on pastures full of clover, shepherds sometimes had to puncture the stomachs of sheep with a sharp knife to release all the gases that built up inside them.

12701. History Facts
In the old days, a ‘whipping boy' used to sit next to a royal prince in lessons. If the prince made a mistake, or did something wrong, the whipping boy was punished instead of the prince.

12702. History Facts
In the Middle Ages a royal farter was employed to jump around farting in front of the king to amuse him.

12703. History Facts
In Africa, it was common to bend back springy saplings and tie them beneath the ears of someone about to be beheaded, so that the person's last sensation would be of their head flying through the air.

12704. History Facts
Until 1868, criminals could be transported from England – sent to Australia for seven or fourteen years – for even petty crimes. The youngest victim was a boy of nine, transported for stealing.

12705. History Facts
King Henry VIII of England, employed the death penalty more than any other English king in history.

12706. History Facts
A punishment used in China in the old days was for a prisoner to be kept in an iron cage with his head sticking out the top.The cage was too tall to sit in, and too short to stand up. Some prisoners were left to starve to death inside.

12707. History Facts
A common test for the guilt of a person accused of witchcraft was to throw them in a pond. If they floated, they were guilty and were executed. If they sank, they were innocent – but probably drowned.

12708. History Facts
At banquets, the Gauls used to award the legs of roast animals to the bravest warriors. Sometimes fights to the death resulted from the squabbles over who should get them.

12709. History Facts
Long ago, criminals would be hanged in a metal cage called a gibbet, or in chains, near the scene of their crime ‘until their bones rotted to nothing'.

12710. History Facts
In 1577, an outbreak of typhus in an Oxford jail killed 300 people – the judges, jury, witnesses and spectators at criminal trials.The prisoners, used to living in filthy conditions, all survived.

12711. History Facts
Vlad the Impaler used to entertain guests to dinner surrounded by the bodies of people he had executed, impaled on spikes.

12712. History Facts
During the French Revolution, large crowds watched public executions by guillotine and people would rush forward to try to collect blood dripping from the heads lifted to show the crowd. They would keep bloody handkerchieves as souvenirs of the outing.

12713. History Facts
In 1857, a group of Indian people who rebelled against the ruling British were strapped across the mouths of live cannons and blown to bits when cannon balls were shot through them.

12714. History Facts
People who killed themselves used to be buried at a cross-roads with a stake through their heart. It was thought that they couldn't go to heaven, and the cross-roads would confuse their ghost so that it couldn't find the way home to haunt anyone.

12715. History Facts
A trusted servant of William of Orange, a Dutch king of England, spent money the king had given him for clothes on pistols, which he used to shoot the king. As punishment, he had his flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers, his guts pulled out and his body cut into pieces.

12716. History Facts
In 1685, a wolf that terrorized a village near Ansbach in Germany was sentenced to be dressed in human clothing and hanged.

12717. History Facts
The first person to be found guilty of a crime on the basis of finger print evidence was an Argentinian woman who murdered her children in 1892. Her fingerprints were found in blood on a door frame.

12718. History Facts
In Ancient Babylon, a doctor who accidentally killed a patient had his hands cut off.

12719. History Facts
A punishment for an English woman who nagged her husband or gossiped too much was to wear a metal cage over her head called a ‘scold's bridle'. It had a spiked plate inside her mouth that would cut her tongue if she moved it to speak.

12720. History Facts
Inca women washed their hair in week-old urine, braided it, and then used more old urine to keep it in place.

12721. History Facts
The Chinchorro people of Chile mummified their dead 8,000 years ago.They cut off the arms and legs, removed and smoked the skin, strapped sticks to the bones and replaced all the soft parts with grass and ashes, then put the whole body back together and painted it.

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