e Catskill Mountains, perhaps--but the present
datum is that with this substance, larks, quail, ducks, and water hens,
some of them alive, fell at Lyons and Grenoble and other places.

I have notes upon other birds that have fallen from the sky, but
unaccompanied by the red rain that makes the fall of birds in France
peculiar, and very peculiar, if it be accepted that the red substance
was extra-mundane. The other notes are upon birds that have fallen from
the sky, in the midst of storms, or of exhausted, but living, birds,
falling not far from a storm-area. But now we shall have an instance for
which I can find no parallel: fall of dead birds, from a clear sky,
far-distant from any storm to which they could be attributed--so remote
from any discoverable storm that--

My own notion is that, in the summer of 1896, something, or some beings,
came as near to this earth as they could, upon a hunting expedition;
that, in the summer of 1896, an expedition of super-scientists passed
over this earth, and let down a dragnet--and what would it catch,
sweeping through the air, supposing it to have reached not quite to this
earth?

In the _Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1917, W.L. McAtee quotes from the
Baton Rouge correspondence to the _Philadelphia Times_:

That, in the summer of 1896, into the streets of Baton Rouge, La., and
from a "clear sky," fell hundreds of dead birds. There were wild ducks
and cat birds, woodpeckers, and "many birds of strange plumage," some of
them resembling canaries.

Usually one does not have to look very far from any place to learn of a
storm. But the best that could be done in this instance was to say:

"There had been a storm on the coast of Florida."

And, unless he have psycho-chemic repulsion for the explanation, the
reader feels only momentary astonishment that dead birds from a storm in
Florida should fall from an unstormy sky in Louisiana, and with his
intellect greased like the plumage of a wild duck, the datum then drops
off.

Our greasy, shiny brains. That they may be of some use after all: that
other modes of existence place a high value upon them as lubricants;
that we're hunted for them; a hunting expedition to this earth--the
newspapers report a tornado.

If from a clear sky, or a sky in which there were no driven clouds, or
other evidences of still-continuing wind-power--or, if from a storm in
Florida, it could be accepted that hundreds of birds had fallen far
away, in Louisi