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October 12: National Day in Spain (1492)

Illustration of French balloonist Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse

• 1398 – The Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas the Great and the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights Konrad von Jungingen signed the Treaty of Salynas, the third attempt to cede Samogitia to the Knights.
• 1799 – Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse became the first woman to make a parachute descent (illustrated), falling 900 m (3,000 ft) in a hot-air balloon gondola.
• 1892 – The Pledge of Allegiance of the United States was first used in public schools to coincide with the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
• 1960 – Japan Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma was assassinated on live television by a man using a samurai sword.
• 1984 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, in a failed attempt to assassinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her cabinet.

The peacock include three species of birds in the genera Pavo and Afropavo of the Phasianidae family, the pheasants and their allies. The two Asiatic species are the blue or Indian peafowl originally of the Indian subcontinent, and the green peafowl of Southeast Asia; the one African species is the Congo peafowl, native only to the Congo Basin. Male peafowl are known for their piercing calls and their extravagant plumage. The latter is especially prominent in the Asiatic species, which have an eye-spotted "tail" or "train" of covert feathers, which they display as part of a courtship ritual. The term peacock is properly reserved for the male; the female is known as a peahen, and the immature offspring are sometimes called peachicks.^[1]

The functions of the elaborate iridescent colouration and large "train" of peacocks have been the subject of extensive scientific debate. Charles Darwin suggested they served to attract females, and the showy features of the males had evolved by sexual selection. More recently, Amotz Zahavi proposed in his handicap theory that these features acted as honest signals of the males' fitness, since less-fit males would be disadvantaged by the difficulty of surviving with such large and conspicuous structures.