ere wingless."
(_Scientific American_, 30-193.) Enormous fall of ants, Nancy, France,
July 21, 1887--"most of them were wingless." (_Nature_, 36-349.) Fall of
enormous, unknown ants--size of wasps--Manitoba, June, 1895. (_Sci.
Amer._, 72-385.)

However, our expression will be:

That wingless, larval forms of life, in numbers so enormous that
migration from some place external to this earth is suggested, have
fallen from the sky.

That these "migrations"--if such can be our acceptance--have occurred at
a time of hibernation and burial far in the ground of larvae in the
northern latitudes of this earth; that there is significance in
recurrence of these falls in the last of January--or that we have the
square of an incredibility in such a notion as that of selection of
larvae by whirlwinds, compounded with selection of the last of January.

I accept that there are "snow worms" upon this earth--whatever their
origin may have been. In the _Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia_,
1899-125, there is a description of yellow worms and black worms that
have been found together on glaciers in Alaska. Almost positively were
there no other forms of insect-life upon these glaciers, and there was
no vegetation to support insect-life, except microscopic organisms.
Nevertheless the description of this probably polymorphic species fits a
description of larvae said to have fallen in Switzerland, and less
definitely fits another description. There is no opposition here, if our
data of falls are clear. Frogs of every-day ponds look like frogs said
to have fallen from the sky--except the whitish frogs of Birmingham.
However, all falls of larvae have not positively occurred in the last of
January:

London _Times_, April 14, 1837:

That, in the parish of Bramford Speke, Devonshire, a large number of
black worms, about three-quarters of an inch in length, had fallen in a
snowstorm.

In Timb's _Year Book_, 1877-26, it is said that, in the winter of 1876,
at Christiania, Norway, worms were found crawling upon the ground. The
occurrence is considered a great mystery, because the worms could not
have come up from the ground, inasmuch as the ground was frozen at the
time, and because they were reported from other places, also, in Norway.

Immense number of black insects in a snowstorm, in 1827, at Pakroff,
Russia. (_Scientific American_, 30-193.)

Fall, with snow, at Orenburg, Russia, Dec. 14, 1830, of a multitude of
small, black insects