Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/103

Rh is—"bright ball of fire and light in a hurricane in England, Sept. 2, 1786." The remarkable datum here is that this phenomenon was visible forty minutes. That's about 800 times the duration that the orthodox give to meteors and meteorites.

See the Annual Register—many instances.

In Nature, Oct. 25, 1877, and the London Times, Oct. 15, 1877, something that fell in a gale of Oct. 14, 1877, is described as a "huge ball of green fire." This phenomenon is described by another correspondent, in Nature, 17-10, and an account of it by another correspondent was forwarded to Nature by W. F. Denning.

There are so many instances that some of us will revolt against the insistence of the faithful that it is only coincidence, and accept that there is connection of the kind called causal. If it is too difficult to think of stones and metallic masses swerved from their courses by storms, if they move at high velocity, we think of low velocity, or of things having no velocity at all, hovering a few miles above this earth, dislodged by storms, and falling luminously.

But the resistance is so great here, and "coincidence" so insisted upon that we'd better have some more instances:

Aerolite in a storm at St. Leonards-on-sea, England, Sept. 17, 1885—no trace of it found (Annual Register, 1885); meteorite in a gale, March 1, 1886, described in the Monthly Weather Review, March, 1886; meteorite in a thunderstorm, off coast of Greece, Nov. 19, 1899 (Nature, 61-111); fall of a meteorite in a storm, July 7, 1883, near Lachine, Quebec (Monthly Weather Review, July, 1883); same phenomenon noted in Nature, 28-319; meteorite in a whirlwind, Sweden, Sept. 24, 1883 (Nature, 29-15).

''London Roy. Soc. Proc.'', 6-276:

A triangular cloud that appeared in a storm, Dec. 17, 1852; a red nucleus, about half the apparent diameter of the moon, and a long tail; visible 13 minutes; explosion of the nucleus.

Nevertheless, in Science Gossip, n.s., 6-65, it is said that, though meteorites have fallen in storms, no connection is supposed to exist between the two phenomena, except by the ignorant peasantry.

But some of us peasants have gone through the Report of the British Association, 1852. Upon page 239, Dr. Buist, who had never heard of the Super-Sargasso Sea, says that, though it is difficult to trace connection between the phenomena, three aerolites had fallen in five months, in India, during thunderstorms, in 1851 (may have been 1852). For accounts by witnesses, see page 229, of the Report.