56 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



identifying the Amherst phenomenon as a fungus was rather notable 

 as scientific vaudeville, if we acquit him of the charge of serious- 

 ness or that, in a place where fungi were so common that, before 

 a given evening two of them sprang up, only he, a stranger in this 

 very fungiferous place, knew a fungus when he saw something 

 like a fungus if we disregard its quick liquefaction, for instance. 

 It was only a monologue, however: now we have an all-star cast: 

 and they're not only Irish; they're royal Irish. 



The royal Irishmen excluded "coal-blackness" and included 

 fibrousness: so then that this substance was "marsh-paper," which 

 "had been raised into the air by storms of wind, and had again 

 fallen." 



Second act: 



It was said that, according to M. Ehrenberg, "the meteor-paper 

 was found to consist partly of vegetable matter, chiefly of conifervae." 



Third act: 



Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen: 



Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited. 



Their composition was chiefly of conifervse. 



This was a double inclusion: or it's the method of agreement that 

 logicians make so much of. So no logician would be satisfied with 

 identifying a peanut as a camel, because both have humps: he 

 demands accessory agreement that both can live a long time with- 

 out water, for instance. 



Now, it's not so very unreasonable, at least to the free and easy 

 vaudeville standards that, throughout this book, we are considering, 

 to think that a green substance could be snatched up from one 

 place in a whirlwind, and fall as a black substance somewhere else: 

 but the royal Irishmen excluded something else, and it is a datum 

 that was as accessible to them as it is to me: 



That, according to Chladni, this was no little, local deposition that 

 was seen to occur by some indefinite person living near a pond 

 somewhere. 



It was a tremendous fall from a vast sky-area. 



Likely enough all the marsh paper in the world could not have 

 supplied it. 



At the same time, this substance was falling "in great quantities," 

 in Norway and Pomerania. Or see Kirkwood, Meteoric Astronomy, 

 p. 66: 



"Substance like charred paper fell in Norway and other parts of 

 northern Europe, Jan. 31, 1686." 



