Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/56

50 returned next morning and found a gelatinous mass of grayish color.

According to Chladni's account (Annals of Philosophy, n.s., 12-94) a viscous mass fell with a luminous meteorite between Siena and Rome, May, 1652; viscous matter found after the fall of a fire ball, in Lusatia, March, 1796; fall of a gelatinous substance, after the explosion of a meteorite, near Heidelburg, July, 1811. In the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 1-234, the substance that fell at Lusatia is said to have been of the "color and odor of dried, brown varnish." In the ''Amer. Jour. Sci.'', 1-26-133, it is said that gelatinous matter fell with a globe of fire, upon the island of Lethy, India, 1718.

In the ''Amer. Jour. Sci.'', 1-26-396, in many observations upon the meteors of November, 1833, are reports of falls of gelatinous substance:

That, according to newspaper reports, "lumps of jelly" were found on the ground at Rahway, N. J. The substance was whitish, or resembled the coagulated white of an egg;

That Mr. H. H. Garland, of Nelson County, Virginia, had found a jelly-like substance of about the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece;

That, according to a communication from A. C. Twining to Prof. Olmstead, a woman at West Point, N. Y., had seen a mass the size of a tea cup. It looked like boiled starch;

That, according to a newspaper, of Newark, N. J., a mass of gelatinous substance, like soft soap, had been found. "It possessed little elasticity, and, on the application of heat, it evaporated as readily as water."

It seems incredible that a scientist would have such hardihood, or infidelity, as to accept that these things had fallen from the sky: nevertheless, Prof. Olmstead, who collected these lost souls says:

"The fact that the supposed deposits were so uniformly described as gelatinous substance forms a presumption in favor of the supposition that they had the origin ascribed to them."

In contemporaneous scientific publications considerable attention was given to Prof. Olmstead's series of papers upon this subject of the November meteors. You will not find one mention of the part that treats of gelatinous matter.