H4 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



may occur to some of them, and of a new material for the deep-sea 

 fishes to disregard 



Object that fell at Richland, South Carolina yellow to gray 

 said to look like a piece of brick. (Amer. Jour. Sci., 2-34-298.) 



Pieces of "furnace-made brick" said to have fallen in a hail- 

 stormat Padua, Aug., 1834. (Edin. New Phil. Jour., 19-87.) 

 The writer offered an explanation that started another convention: 

 that the fragments of brick had been knocked from buildings by 

 the hailstones. But there is here a concomitant that will be dis- 

 agreeable to any one who may have been inclined to smile at the 

 now digestible-enough notion that furnace-made bricks have fallen 

 from the sky. It is that in some of the hailstones two per cent of 

 them that were found with the pieces of brick, was a light grayish 

 powder. 



Monthly Notices oj the Royal Astronomical Society, 337-365: 



Padre Sechi explains that a stone said to have fallen, in a thunder- 

 storm, at Supino, Italy, Sept., 1875, had been knocked from a roof. 



Nature, 33-1 53 : 



That it had been reported that a good-sized stone, of form clearly 

 artificial, had fallen at Naples, Nov., 1885. The stone was described 

 by two professors of Naples, who had accepted it as inexplicable but 

 veritable. They were visited by Dr. H. Johnstone-Lavis, the corre- 

 spondent to Nature, whose investigations had convinced him that the 

 object was a "shoemaker's lapstone." 



Now to us of the initiated, or to us of the wider outlook, there is 

 nothing incredible in the thought of shoemakers in other worlds 

 but I suspect that this characterization is tactical. 



This object of worked stone, or this shoemaker's lapstone, was 

 made of Vesuvian lava, Dr. Johnstone-Lavis thinks: most probably 

 of lava of the flow of 1631, from the La Scala quarries. We con- 

 demn "most probably" as bad positivism. As to the "men of posi- 

 tion," who had accepted that this thing had fallen from the sky "I 

 have now obliged them to admit their mistake," says Dr. Johnstone- 

 Lavis or it's always the stranger in Naples who knows La Scala 

 lava better than the natives know it. 



Explanation: 



That the thing had been knocked from, or thrown from, a roof. 



As to attempt to trace the occurrence to any special roof nothing 

 said upon that subject. Or that Dr. Johnstone-Lavis called a carved 

 stone a "lapstone," quite as Mr. Symons called a spherical object a 

 "cannon ball": bent upon a discrediting incongruity: 



