Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/49

Rh In the American Journal of Science, 1-2-335, is Professor Graves' account, communicated by Professor Dewey:

That, upon the evening of August 13, 1819, a light was seen in Amherst—a falling object—sound as if of an explosion.

In the home of Prof. Dewey, this light was reflected upon a wall of a room in which were several members of Prof. Dewey's family.

The next morning, in Prof. Dewey's front yard, in what is said to have been the only position from which the light that had been seen in the room, the night before, could have been reflected, was found a substance "unlike anything before observed by anyone who saw it." It was a bowl-shaped object, about 8 inches in diameter, and one inch thick. Bright buff-colored, and having upon it a "fine nap." Upon removing this covering, a buff-colored, pulpy substance of the consistency of soft-soap, was found—"of an offensive, suffocating smell."

A few minutes of exposure to the air changed the buff color to "a livid color resembling venous blood." It absorbed moisture quickly from the air and liquefied. For some of the chemic reactions, see the Journal.

There's another lost quasi-soul of a datum that seems to me to belong here:

London Times, April 19, 1836:

Fall of fish that had occurred in the neighborhood of Allahabad, India. It is said that the fish were of the chalwa species, about a span in length and a seer in weight—you know.

They were dead and dry.

Or they had been such a long time out of water that we can't accept that they had been scooped out of a pond, by a whirlwind—even though they were so definitely identified as of a known local species

Or they were not fish at all.

I incline, myself, to the acceptance that they were not fish, but slender, fish-shaped objects of the same substance as that which fell at Amherst—it is said that, whatever they were, they could not be eaten: that "in the pan, they turned to blood."

For details of this story see the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1834-307. May 16 or 17, 1834, is the date given in the Journal.

In the American Journal of Science, 1-25-362, occurs the inevitable damnation of the Amherst object:

Prof. Edward Hitchcock went to live in Amherst. He says that