Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/60

54 said to be "manna"; and "manna" is dogmatically said to be a species of lichens from the steppes of Asia Minor. The position that I take is that this explanation was evolved in ignorance of the fall of vegetable substances, or edible substances, in other parts of the world: that it is the familiar attempt to explain the general in terms of the local; that, if we shall have data of falls of vegetable substance, in, say, Canada, or India, they were not of lichens from the steppes of Asia Minor; that, though all falls in Asiatic Turkey and Persia are sweepingly and conveniently called showers of "manna," they have not been even all of the same substance. In one instance the particles are said to have been "seeds." Though, in Comptes Rendus, the substance that fell in 1841 and 1846, is said to have been gelatinous, in the ''Bull. Sci. Nat. de Neuchatel'', it is said to have been of something, in lumps the size of a filbert, that had been ground into flour; that of this flour had been made bread, very attractive-looking, but flavorless.

The great difficulty is to explain segregation in these showers But deep sea fishes and occasional falls down to them, of edible substances; bags of grain, barrels of sugar; things that had not been whirled up from one part of the ocean-bottom, in storms or submarine disturbances, and dropped somewhere else I suppose one thinks—but grain in bags never has fallen

Object of Amherst—its covering like "milled cloth"

Or barrels of corn lost from a vessel would not sink—but a host of them clashing together, after a wreck—they burst open; the corn sinks, or does when saturated; the barrel staves float longer

If there be not an overhead traffic in commodities similar to our own commodities carried over this earth's oceans—I'm not the deep-sea fish I think I am.

I have no data other than the mere suggestion of the Amherst object of bags or barrels, but my notion is that bags and barrels from a wreck on one of this earth's oceans, would, by the time they reached the bottom, no longer be recognizable as bags or barrels; that, if we can have data of the fall of fibrous material that may have been cloth or paper or wood, we shall be satisfactory and grotesque enough.

''Proc. Roy. Irish Acad.'', 1-379:

"In the year 1686, some workmen, who had been fetching water from a pond, seven German miles from Memel, on returning to their work, after dinner (during which there had been a snow storm) found the flat ground around the pond covered with a coal-black,