Nut Case

Apropos of not much but interesting nonetheless (and therefore a justifiable subject for a post!), this nut from dictionary.com:

   The term "in a nutshell" refers to a short description, or a story told in no more words than can physically fit in the shell of a nut. But the origin of the term tests those limits with the most longwinded of tales. The ancient Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder claimed that a copy of Homer's The Iliad existed that was small enough to fit inside a walnut shell. Almost 2,000 years later, in the early 1700s, the Bishop of Avranches tested Pliny's theory by writing out the epic in tiny handwriting on a walnut-sized piece of paper, and lo and behold, he did it!

   All of which, of course, begs many questions, one being, as there must have been many bishops of Avranches over time, which is the one who wrote out The Iliad?According to Fact Monster (http://www.factmonster.com/dictionary/brewers/iliad.html), it was a Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721 ~ which would have placed the accomplishment in question in the late, not the early, 1700s). Apparently quite the polymath, Huet translated works from and into Latin and Greek in addition to writing his own tomes. He co-founded the first provincial academy of science to receive a royal charter and directed its work for some time. According to Wikipedia, "His taste for mathematics led him to the study of astronomy. He next turned his attention to anatomy, and, being short-sighted, deovted his inquiries mainly to the question of vision and the formation of the eye. In the course of this study, he made more than 800 dissections. He then learned all that was then to be learned in chemistry, and wrote a Latin poem on salt": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Daniel_Huet