BOOK OF THE DAMNED 105 



he jumped or leaped to the conclusion that it had fallen: process 

 likely to be more leisurely in tropical countries. Also I'm afraid 

 his way of reasoning was not very original: just so were fragments 

 of the Bath-furnace meteorite, accepted by orthodoxy, discovered. 



We shall now have an unusual experience. We shall read of some 

 reports of extraordinary circumstances that were investigated by a 

 man of science not, of course that they were really investigated by 

 him, but that his phenomena occupied a position approximating 

 higher to real investigation than to utter neglect. Over and over we 

 read of extraordinary occurrences no discussion; not even a com- 

 ment afterward findable; mere mention occasionally burial and 

 damnation. 



The extraordinary and how quickly it is hidden away. 



Burial and damnation, or the obscurity of the conspicuous. 



We did read of a man who, in the matter of snails, did travel some 

 distance to assure himself of something that he had suspected in 

 advance; and we remember Prof. Hitchcock, who had only to smite 

 Amherst with the wand of his botanical knowledge, and lo! two 

 fungi sprang up before night; and we did read of Dr. Gray and his 

 thousands of fishes from one pailful of water but these instances 

 stand out; more frequently there was no "investigation." We 

 now have a good many reported occurrences that were "investi- 

 gated." Of things said to have fallen from the sky, we make, in 

 the usual scientific way, two divisions: miscellaneous objects and 

 substances, and symmetric objects attributable to beings like human 

 beings, sub-dividing into wedges, spheres, and disks. 



Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 14-207: 



That, July 2, 1866, a correspondent to a London newspaper 

 wrote that something had fallen from the sky, during a thunder- 

 storm of June 30, 1866, at Netting Hill. Mr. G. T. Symons, of 

 Symons' Meteorological Magazine, investigated, about as fairly, and 

 with about as unprejudiced a mind, as anything ever has been 

 investigated. 



He says that the object was nothing but a lump of coal: that, 

 next door to the home of the correspondent coal had been unloaded 

 the day before. With the uncanny wisdom of the stranger upon 

 unfamiliar ground that we have noted before, Mr. Symons saw 

 that the coal reported to have fallen from the sky, and the coal 

 unloaded more prosaically the day before, were identical. Persons 

 in the neighborhood, unable to make this simple identification, had 

 bought from the correspondent pieces of the object reported to have 



