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Yeah, that always bugged me about Holmes. He specifically restricted his fields of knowledge to things that could help him solve cases - so how did he know this in advance? He had encyclopedic knowledge of the muds of England, for example, but Watson was shocked to find he had never heard of the Copernican system of cosmology. So it's damn fortunate he was never engaged to investigate anything involving an astronomer, right?

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That was just A Study in Scarlet. Which a lot of scholars think Holmes was more-or-less trolling Watson. In the Valley of Fear Holmes remarked that all knowledge was useful to him

source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he told me to focus :P

I think that's what makes the character so intriguing. 90% impossible arguments of why he does the things he does but still you don't fail to be amazed.

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