Page:New lands - (IA newlands00fort).pdf/257

 that the insects were blown in on the wind from a warmer climate.”

The fall of unknown insects in a snow storm is not the circumstance that I call most attention to. It is worth noting that I have records of half a dozen similar occurrences in the Alps, usually about the last of January, but the striking circumstance is that insects of different species and of different specific gravities fell together. The conventional explanation is that a wind, far away, raised a great variety of small objects, and segregated them according to specific gravity, so that twigs and grasses fell in one place, dust some other place, pebbles somewhere else, and insects farther along somewhere. This would be very fine segregation. There was no very fine segregation in this occurrence. Something of a. seasonal, or migratory, nature, from some other world, localized in the sky, relatively to the Alps, is suggested.

May 4, 1922—discovery, by F. Burnerd, of three long mounds in the lunar crater Archimedes. See the English Mechanic, 115-194, 218, 268, 278. It seems likely that these constructions had been recently built.

St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, May 18, 1922 (Associated Press)— particles of matter falling continuously for several days. “The phenomenon is supposed here to be of volcanic origin, but all the volcanoes of the West Indies are reported as quiet.”

New York Tribun, July 3, 1922—that, for the fourth time in one month, a great volume of water, or a “cloudburst,” had poured from one local sky, near Carbondale, Pa.

Oct. 15, 1922—a large quantity of white substance that fell upon the shores of Lake Michigan, near Chicago. It fell upon the clothes of hundreds of persons, fell upon the campus of Northwestern University, likely enough fell upon the astronomical observatory of the University. It occurred to one of these hundreds, or thousands, of persons to collect some of this substance. He is Mr. L. A. Hopkins, 111 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago. He sent me a sample. I think that it is spider web, because it is viscous: when burned it chars with the crinkled effect of burned hair and feathers, and the odor is similar. But it is strong, tough substance, of a cottony texture, when rolled up. The interesting circumstance to me is that similar substance has fallen frequently