54 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



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 subma- 

 rine disturbances, and dropped somewhere else 



I suppose one thinks but grtiin 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, 



