Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/69

Rh If, intermittently, or "for a good part of the spring," this substance fell in two Irish provinces, and nowhere else, we have, stronger than before, a sense of a stationary region overhead, or a region that receives products like this earth's products, but from external sources, a region in which this earth's gravitational and meteorological forces are relatively inert—if for many weeks a good part of this substance did hover before finally falling. We suppose that, in 1685, Mr. Vans and the Bishop of Cloyne could describe what they saw as well as could witnesses in 1885: nevertheless, it is going far back; we shall have to have many modern instances before we can accept.

As to other falls, or another fall, it is said in the ''Amer. Jour. Sci.'', 1-28-361, that, April 11, 1832—about a month after the fall of the substance of Kourianof—fell a substance that was wine-yellow, transparent, soft, and smelling like rancid oil. M. Herman, a chemist who examined it, named it "sky oil." For analysis and chemic reactions, see the Journal. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 13-368, mentions an "unctuous" substance that fell near Rotterdam, in 1832. In Comptes Rendus, 13-215, there is an account of an oily, reddish matter that fell at Genoa, February, 1841.

Whatever it may have been

Altogether, most of our difficulties are problems that we should leave to later developers of super-geography, I think. A discoverer of America should leave Long Island to some one else. If there be, plying back and forth from Jupiter and Mars and Venus, super-constructions that are sometimes wrecked, we think of fuel as well as cargoes. Of course the most convincing data would be of coal falling from the sky: nevertheless, one does suspect that oil-burning engines were discovered ages ago in more advanced worlds—but, as I say, we should leave something to our disciples—so we'll not especially wonder whether these butter-like, or oily substances were food or fuel. So we merely note that in the Scientific American, 24-323, is an account of hail that fell, in the middle of April, 1871, in Mississippi, in which was a substance described as turpentine.

Something that tasted like orange water, in hailstones, about the first of June, 1842, near Nimes, France; identified as nitric acid (Jour. de Pharmacie, 1845-273).

Hail and ashes, in Ireland, 1755 (Sci. Amer., 5-168).

That, at Elizabeth, N. J., June 9, 1874, fell hail in which was a