There are said to be more than two million little openings in the skins of our bodies to serve as outlets for an equal number of sweat glands. The body contains more than two hundred bones. It is said that as much blood as is in the entire body passes through the heart every minute, i.e., all the blood in the body goes in and out of the heart once every minute. The lung capacity of the average person is about 325 cubic inches.
With every breath you inhale about two-thirds of a pint of fresh air and exhale an equal amount if you breathe normally.
The stomach of the average adult person has a capacity of about five pints and manufactures about nine pounds of gastric juice daily.
There are over five hundred muscles in the body all of which should be exercised daily to keep you in the best condition. The average adult human heart weighs from eight to twelve ounces and it beats about 100,000 times every twenty-four hours. The perspiration system in the body has only very small ducts or pipes, but there are about nine miles of them. The average person takes about one ton of food and drink each year. We breathe about eighteen times a minute, which amounts to about 3,000 cubic feet an hour.
The expression originally came from the method used in stringing a hog after killing it. The pig after being slaughtered was hung by the hind legs. A piece of bent wood was passed in behind the tendons of each of the hind legs and the pig hung up by this stick of wood much like we hang up clothes with a clothes hanger today. The piece of wood was called a bucket. The “bucket” part of the expression does not, therefore, refer to a bucket at all but to this bent piece of wood. All are not agreed on this explanation, however, as it does not explain where the “kick” comes in. Many investigators hold to the belief that a man named Bolsover was the first to “kick the bucket” literally and that the expression came from the manner of his death. He stood on a pail or bucket while arranging to hang himself by tying a rope around his neck and to a beam which he could not reach without standing on the bucket. When ready he kicked the bucket out from under his feet and so succeeded in carrying out his own wishes and in so doing coined a famous expression which still means “to die.”
The word “News” which was created to describe what newspapers are supposed to print, came from the four letters which have for ages been used as abbreviations of the directions of the compass. In this N stands for North, E for East, S for South and W for West, and in illustrating the points of the compass the following diagram has long been used:
The earliest newspapers always printed this sign on the front pages of their papers in every issue. This was done to indicate that the paper printed all the happenings from four quarters of the globe.
Later on some enterprising newspaper man who may have forgotten the original significance of the letter in the diagram, arranged the letters N. E. W. S. in a straight line at the head of the paper and that is how what we read in the papers came to be known as news.
Almost one-half the whole number of newspapers published in the world are published in the United States and Canada.
No one knows who made the first umbrella but we know that Jonas Hanway of London was the first man to carry one over his head to keep off the rain.
Umbrellas seem to have been known as far back as the days of Ninevah and Persepolis, for representations of them appear frequently in the sculptures of those early days. The women of ancient Rome and Greece carried them but the men never did.
Mr. Hanway is said to be the first man who walked in the streets of London with an open umbrella over his head to keep off the rain. He is said to have used it for thirty years before they came into general use for this purpose.