46 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



the fast place, and had swollen in rain, and, attracting attention by 

 greatly increased volume, had been supposed by unscientific ob- 

 servers 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 Supple- 

 ment, is amusing to some of us, who, I fear, may be a little im- 

 proper 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 con- 

 viction 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 identi- 

 fied 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 in- 

 visible 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 



