BOOK OF THE DAMNED 113 



That, at the meeting of the Institute, of Dec. i, 1888, one of the 

 members, Mr. J. A. Livingstone, exhibited a globular quartz body 

 which he asserted had fallen from the sky. It had been split open. 

 It was hollow. 



But the other members of the Institute decided that the object 

 was spurious, because it was not of "true meteoritic material." 



No date; no place mentioned; we note the suggestion that it was 

 only a geode, which had been upon the ground in the first place. It's 

 crystalline lining was geode-like. 



Quartz is upon the "index prohibitory" of Science. A monk who 

 would read Darwin would sin no more than would a scientist who 

 would admit that, except by the "up and down" process, quartz has 

 ever fallen from the sky but Continuity: it is not excommunicated 

 if part of or incorporated in a baptized meteorite St. Catherine's of 

 Mexico, I think. It's as epicurean a distinction as any ever made by 

 theologians. Fassig lists a quartz pebble, found in a hailstone 

 (Bibliography, part 2-355). "Up and down," of course. Another 

 object of quartzite was reported to have fallen, in the autumn of 

 1880, at Schroon Lake, N. Y. said in the Scientific American, 

 43-272 to be a fraud it was not the usual. About the first of 

 May, 1899, the newspapers published a story of a "snow-white" 

 meteorite that had fallen, at Vincennes, Indiana. The Editor of the 

 Monthly Weather Review ("M. W. R." April, 1899) requested the 

 local observer, at Vincennes, to investigate. The Editor says that 

 the thing was only a fragment of a quartz bowlder. He says that 

 any one with at least a public school education should know better 

 than to write that quartz has ever fallen from the sky. 



Notes and Queries, 2-8-92: 



That, in the Leyden Museum of Antiquities, there is a disk of 

 quartz: 6 centimeters by 5 millimeters by about 5 centimeters; 

 said to have fallen upon a plantation in the Dutch West Indies, after 

 a meteoric explosion. 



Bricks. 



I think this is a vice we're writing. I recommend it to those who 

 have hankered for a new sin. At first some of our data were of so 

 frightful or ridiculous mien, as to be hated, or eyeBrowed, was only 

 to be seen. Then some pity crept in? I think that we can now 

 embrace bricks. 



The baked-clay-idea was all right in its place, but it rather lacks 

 distinction, I think. With our minds upon the concrete boats that 

 have been building terrestrially lately, and thinking of wrecks that 



