Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/52

46 the first place, and had swollen in rain, and, attracting attention by greatly increased volume, had been supposed by unscientific observers to have fallen in rain

What rain, I don't know.

Also it is spoken of as "dried" several times. That's one of the most important of the details.

But die relief of outraged propriety, expressed in the Supplement, is amusing to some of us, who, I fear, may be a little improper at times. Very spirit of the Salvation Army, when some third-rate scientist comes out with an explanation of the vermiform appendix or the os cocyx that would have been acceptable to Moses. To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that Mr. Brandeis had identified the substance as "flesh-colored" nostoc.

Prof. Lawrence Smith, of Kentucky, one of the most resolute of the exclusionists:

New York Times, March 12, 1876:

That the substance had been examined and analyzed by Prof. Smith, according to whom, it gave every indication of being the "dried" spawn of some reptile, "doubtless of the frog"—or up from one place and down in another. As to "dried," that may refer to condition when Prof. Smith received it.

In the Scientific American Supplement, 2-473, Dr. A. Mead Edwards, President of the Newark Scientific Association, writes that, when he saw Mr. Brandeis' communication, his feeling was of conviction that propriety had been re-established, or that the problem had been solved, as he expresses it: knowing Mr. Brandeis well, he had called upon that upholder of respectability, to see the substance that had been identified as nostoc. But he had also called upon Dr. Hamilton, who had a specimen, and Dr. Hamilton had declared it to be lung-tissue. Dr. Edwards writes of the substance that had so completely, or beautifully—if beauty is completeness—been identified as nostoc—"It turned out to be lung tissue also." He wrote to other persons who had specimens, and identified other specimens as masses of cartilage or muscular fibres. "As to whence it came, I have no theory." Nevertheless he endorses the local explanation—and a bizarre thing it is:

A flock of gorged, heavy-weighted buzzards, but far up and invisible in the clear sky They had disgorged.

Prof. Fassig lists the substance, in his "Bibliography," as fish spawn. McAtee (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1918), lists