weighing several pounds--each, I suppose--had fallen from the sky. They
are described as "large ice-flakes."

Vast fields of ice in the Super-Arctic regions, or strata, of the
Super-Sargasso Sea. When they break up, their fragments are flake-like.
In our acceptance, there are aerial ice-fields that are remote from this
earth; that break up, fragments grinding against one another, rolling in
vapor and water, of different constituency in different regions, forming
slowly as stratified hailstones--but that there are ice-fields near this
earth, that break up into just such flat pieces of ice as cover any pond
or river when ice of a pond or river is broken, and are sometimes soon
precipitated to the earth, in this familiar flat formation.

_Symons' Met. Mag._, 43-154:

A correspondent writes that, at Braemar, July 2, 1908, when the sky was
clear overhead, and the sun shining, flat pieces of ice fell--from
somewhere. The sun was shining, but something was going on somewhere:
thunder was heard.

Until I saw the reproduction of a photograph in the _Scientific
American_, Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be,
say, at least ten or twenty miles away from this earth, and invisible,
to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been
reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by
the _Scientific American_ is of an aggregation supposed to be clouds,
presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are they. The writer says
that they looked to him like "a field of broken ice." Beneath is a
picture of a conventional field of ice, floating ordinarily in water.
The resemblance between the two pictures is striking--nevertheless, it
seems to me incredible that the first of the photographs could be of an
aerial ice-field, or that gravitation could cease to act at only a mile
or so from this earth's surface--

Unless:

The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.

Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen
miles outward--but that gravitation must be rhythmic.

Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed
quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and
astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the
punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all
the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only
insecure approximations.

We refer