Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/183

Rh 1882. We are told that Mr. W. J. Hagler, the North Santa Fé merchant became possessor of it, and packed it in sawdust in his store.

London Times, April 7, 1860:

That, upon the 16th of March, 1860, in a snowstorm, in Upper Wasdale, blocks of ice, so large that at a distance they looked like a flock of sheep, had fallen.

''Rept. Brit. Assoc.'', 1851-32:

That a mass of ice about a cubic yard in size had fallen at Candeish, India, 1828.

Against these data, though, so far as I know, so many of them have never been assembled together before, there is a silence upon the part of scientific men that is unusual. Our Super-Sargasso Sea may not be an unavoidable conclusion, but arrival upon this earth of ice from external regions does seem to be—except that there must be, be it ever so faint, a merger. It is in the notion that these masses of ice are only congealed hailstones. We have data against this notion, as applied to all our instances, but the explanation has been offered, and, it seems to me, may apply in some instances. In the ''Bull. Soc. Astro. de France'', 20-245, it is said of blocks of ice the size of decanters that had fallen at Tunis that they were only masses of congealed hailstones.

London Times, Aug. 4, 1857:

That a block of ice, described as "pure" ice, weighing 25 pounds, had been found in the meadow of Mr. Warner, of Cricklewood. There had been a storm the day before. As in some of our other instances, no one had seen this object fall from the sky. It was found after the storm: that's all that can be said about it.

Letter from Capt. Blakiston, communicated by Gen. Sabine, to the Royal Society (London Roy. Soc. Proc., 10-468):

That, Jan. 14, 1860, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice had fallen upon Capt. Blakiston's vessel—that it was not hail. "It was not hail, but irregular shaped pieces of solid ice of different dimensions, up to the size of half a brick."

According to the Advertiser-Scotsman, quoted by the Edinburgh New Philosophical Magazine, 47-371, an irregular-shaped mass of ice fell at Ord, Scotland, Aug., 1849, after "an extraordinary peal of thunder."

It is said that this was homogeneous ice, except in a small part, which looked like congealed hailstones.

The mass was about 20 feet in circumference.