" extends herself upon her hands
and feet, face uppermost, while a stout platform, with a semicircular
groove for her neck, is fixed upon her chest, abdomen, and thighs by
means of a waist-belt which passes through brass receivers on the under
side of the board. An ordinary upright piano is then placed on the
platform by four men; a performer mounts the platform and plays while
the "strong lady" sings a love song while supporting possibly half a
ton.

Strength of the Jaws.--There are some persons who exhibit extraordinary
power of the jaw. In the curious experiments of Regnard and Blanchard
at the Sorbonne, it was found that a crocodile weighing about 120
pounds exerted a force between its jaws at a point corresponding to the
insertion of the masseter muscles of 1540 pounds; a dog of 44 pounds
exerted a similar force of 363 pounds.

It is quite possible that in animals like the tiger and lion the force
would equal 1700 or 1800 pounds. The anthropoid apes can easily break a
cocoanut with their teeth, and Guyot-Daubes thinks that possibly a
gorilla has a jaw-force of 200 pounds. A human adult is said to exert a
force of from 45 to 65 pounds between his teeth, and some individuals
exceed this average as much as 100 pounds. In Buffon's experiments he
once found a Frenchman who could exert a force of 534 pounds with his
jaws.

In several American circuses there have been seen women who hold
themselves by a strap between their teeth while they are being hauled
up to a trapeze some distance from the ground. A young mulatto girl by
the name of "Miss Kerra" exhibited in the Winter Circus in Paris;
suspended from a trapeze, she supported a man at the end of a strap
held between her teeth, and even permitted herself to be turned round
and round.

She also held a cannon in her teeth while it was fired. This feat has
been done by several others. According to Guyot-Daubes, at Epernay in
1882, while a man named Bucholtz, called "the human cannon," was
performing this feat, the cannon, which was over a yard long and
weighed nearly 200 pounds, burst and wounded several of the spectators.

There was another Hercules in Paris, who with his teeth lifted and held
a heavy cask of water on which was seated a man and varying weights,
according to the size of his audience, at the same time keeping his
hands occupied with other weights. Figure 185 represents a well-known
modern exhibitionist lifting with his teeth a cask on which are seate