86 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



"The fish were all dead, and indeed stiff and hard, when picked 

 up, immediately after the occurrence." 



By all of which I mean that we have only begun to pile up our 

 data of things that fall from a stationary source overhead: we'll 

 have to take up the subject from many approaches before our ac- 

 ceptance, which seems quite as rigorously arrived at as ever has 

 been a belief, can emerge from the accursed. 



I don't know how much the horse and the barn will help us to 

 emerge: but, if ever anything did go up from this earth's surface 

 and stay up those damned things may have: 



Monthly Weather Review, May, 1878: 



In a tornado, in Wisconsin, May 23, 1878, "a barn and a horse 

 were carried completely away, and neither horse nor barn, nor any , 

 portion of either have since been found." 



After that, which would be a little strong were it not for a 

 steady improvement in our digestions that I note as we go along, 

 there is little of the bizarre or the unassimilable, in the turtle that 

 hovered six months or so over a small town in Mississippi: 



Monthly Weather Review, May, 1894: 



That, May n, 1894, at Vicksburg, Miss, fell a small piece of ala- 

 baster; that, at Bovina, eight miles from Vicksburg, fell a gopher 

 turtle. 



They fell in a hailstorm. 



This item was widely copied at the time: for instance, Nature, 

 one of the volumes of 1894, page 430, and Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 

 20-273. As to discussion not a word. Or Science and its continu- 

 ity with Presbyterianism data like this are damned at birth. The 

 Weather Review does sprinkle, or baptize, or attempt to save, this 

 infant but in all the meteorological literature that I have gone 

 through, after that date not a word, except mention once or twice. 

 The Editor of the Review says: 



"An examination of the weather map shows that these hailstorms 

 occur on the south side of a region of cold northerly winds, and 

 were but a small part of a series of similar storms ; apparently some 

 special local whirls or gusts carried heavy objects from this earth's 

 surface up to the cloud regions." 



Of all incredibilities that we have to choose from, I give first 

 place to a notion of a whirlwind pouncing upon a region and scrupu- 

 lously selecting a turtle and a piece of alabaster. This time, the 

 other mechanical thing "there in the first place" can not rise in 

 response to its stimulus: it is resisted in that these objects were 



