Word: palming
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...last year Douglas D. H. March, a tall, curly-haired, young snake collector from Haddon Heights, N. J., had been bitten 14 times by nine varieties of poisonous snake-fer-de-lance. moccasin, copperhead, palm viper. Godman's viper and four subspecies of rattlesnake. Doctors told him that one more bite would probably be the last. Mused he: "I like to say that I am through handling snakes forever, but I know I'm not." Last week Snakeman March emerged unbitten from the jungles of Panama's Darien district proudly bearing to his new serpentarium...
Among the various exhibitions of violence in the day's news, two items stand out above the rest. Down in the pleasant, palm-strewn island of Cuba, a native brand of hell burst out in full vigor as civil war recommenced on a sizeable scale. The fight centered about the several armories, police-station, and forts which dot the mainland; gunboats fought it out with land batteries, machine-guns with snipers, while General Batiste directed his troops with aplomb from the depths of his armored car. Perhaps the most discouraging detail of the whole mess is that there seems...
...called, a large brown ship loomed out of the mists across her bow. The Chicago slackened speed, veered sharply to port. The brown ship scurried across her path, disappeared into the fog. Before the Chicago could swing her bow around again, a second ship, the British freighter Silver Palm, came plowing down on her out of the fog on the port side. The Chicago reversed engines, blared a long shrill collision call. The Silver Palm tried to stop. With a metallic crash her prow rammed 18 feet deep into the side of the Chicago just forward of the first...
...unlucky discharge of a gun. . . . The whole charge, consisting of powder and duck shot, was received in the left side at not more than two or three feet distance from the muzzle of the piece, . . . carrying away by its force the integuments more than the size of the palm of a man's hand; blowing off and fracturing the sixth rib . . . , fracturing the fifth, rupturing the lower portion of the left lobe of the lung and lacerating the stomach by a spicule of the rib that was blown through its coat; landing the charge, wadding, fire in among...
Botanists realized again last week that "century plant" is a complete misnomer for the American aloe (Agave americana). In Mexico where it is called the maguey it takes only 15 years or so to store up the energy to bloom. Unblooming, it looks like an ordinary ground-palm: a rosette of long, pointed leaves spreading out from a central core. When its time comes it hastily pokes up a huge flowering stalk, thick as a tree trunk, from 15 to 40 ft. high, tops it with a huge cauliflower sprig with hundreds of little white or yellow tubular flowers. After...