Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/188

182 1882) that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circumference, the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters—that upon some of them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these objects were not hailstones.

The only merger is that of knobby hailstones, or of large hailstones with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize—not forming by accretion—in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of such hailstones, see Nature, 61-594. Note the size—"some of them the size of turkeys' eggs."

It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen, as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the under side of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations.

Monthly Weather Review, June, 1889:

That, at Oswego, N. Y., June 11, 1889, according to the Turin (N. Y.) Leader, there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that "resembled the fragments of icicles."

Monthly Weather Review, 29-506:

That on Florence Island, St. Lawrence River, Aug. 8, 1901, with ordinary hail, fell pieces of ice "formed like icicles, the size and shape of lead pencils that had been cut into sections about three-eighths of an inch in length."

So our data of the Super-Sargasso Sea, and its Arctic region: and, for weeks at a time, an ice field may hang motionless over a part of this earth's surface—the sun has some effect upon it, but not much until late in the afternoon, I should say—part of it has sagged, but is held up by cohesion with the main mass—whereupon we have such an occurrence as would have been a little uncanny to us once upon a time—or fall of water from a cloudless sky, day after day, in one small part of this earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun's rays had had time for their effects:

Monthly Weather Review, Oct., 1886:

That, according to the Charlotte Chronicle, Oct. 21, 1886, for three weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N. C., localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o'clock; that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.

This is the newspaper account, and, as such, it seems in the depths of the unchosen, either by me or any other expression of the