Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/120

114 may occur to some of them, and of a new material for the deep-sea fishes to disregard

Object that fell at Richland, South Carolina—yellow to gray—said to look like a piece of brick. (Amer. Jour. Sci., 2-34-298.)

Pieces of "furnace-made brick" said to have fallen—in a hailstorm—at Padua, Aug., 1834. (Edin. New Phil. Jour., 19-87.) The writer offered an explanation that started another convention: that the fragments of brick had been knocked from buildings by the hailstones. But there is here a concomitant that will be disagreeable to any one who may have been inclined to smile at the now digestible-enough notion that furnace-made bricks have fallen from the sky. It is that in some of the hailstones—two per cent of them—that were found with the pieces of brick, was a light grayish powder.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 337-365:

Padre Sechi explains that a stone said to have fallen, in a thunderstorm, at Supino, Italy, Sept., 1875, had been knocked from a roof.

Nature, 33-153:

That it had been reported that a good-sized stone, of form clearly artificial, had fallen at Naples, Nov., 1885. The stone was described by two professors of Naples, who had accepted it as inexplicable but veritable. They were visited by Dr. H. Johnstone-Lavis, the correspondent to Nature, whose investigations had convinced him that the object was a "shoemaker's lapstone."

Now to us of the initiated, or to us of the wider outlook, there is nothing incredible in the thought of shoemakers in other worlds—but I suspect that this characterization is tactical.

This object of worked stone, or this shoemaker's lapstone, was made of Vesuvian lava, Dr. Johnstone-Lavis thinks: most probably of lava of the flow of 1631, from the La Scala quarries. We condemn "most probably" as bad positivism. As to the "men of position," who had accepted that this thing had fallen from the sky—"I have now obliged them to admit their mistake," says Dr. Johnstone-Lavis—or it's always the stranger in Naples who knows La Scala lava better than the natives know it.

Explanation:

That the thing had been knocked from, or thrown from, a roof.

As to attempt to trace the occurrence to any special roof—nothing said upon that subject. Or that Dr. Johnstone-Lavis called a carved stone a "lapstone," quite as Mr. Symons called a spherical object a "cannon ball": bent upon a discrediting incongruity: