support to the
acceptance that they had been formed in a medium far denser than air of
this earth at sea-level. In the _Popular Science News_, 22-38, is an
account of ice that had been formed, under great pressure, in the
laboratory of the University of Virginia. When released and brought into
contact with ordinary air, this ice exploded.

And again the flesh-like substance that fell in Kentucky: its flake-like
formation. Here is a phenomenon that is familiar to us: it suggests
flattening, under pressure. But the extraordinary inference is--pressure
not equal on all sides. In the _Annual Record of Science_, 1873-350, it
is said that, in 1873, after a heavy thunderstorm in Louisiana, a
tremendous number of fish scales were found, for a distance of forty
miles, along the banks of the Mississippi River: bushels of them picked
up in single places: large scales that were said to be of the gar fish,
a fish that weighs from five to fifty pounds. It seems impossible to
accept this identification: one thinks of a substance that had been
pressed into flakes or scales. And round hailstones with wide thin
margins of ice irregularly around them--still, such hailstones seem to
me more like things that had been stationary: had been held in a field
of thin ice. In the _Illustrated London News_, 34-546, are drawings of
hailstones so margined, as if they had been held in a sheet of ice.

Some day we shall have an expression which will be, to our advanced
primitiveness, a great joy:

That devils have visited this earth: foreign devils: human-like beings,
with pointed beards: good singers; one shoe ill-fitting--but with
sulphurous exhalations, at any rate. I have been impressed with the
frequent occurrence of sulphurousness with things that come from the
sky. A fall of jagged pieces of ice, Orkney, July 24, 1818 (_Trans. Roy.
Soc. Edin._, 9-187). They had a strong sulphurous odor. And the coke--or
the substance that looked like coke--that fell at Mortree, France, April
24, 1887: with it fell a sulphurous substance. The enormous round things
that rose from the ocean, near the _Victoria_. Whether we still accept
that they were super-constructions that had come from a denser
atmosphere and, in danger of disruption, had plunged into the ocean for
relief, then rising and continuing on their way to Jupiter or Uranus--it
was reported that they spread a "stench of sulphur." At any rate, this
datum of proximity is against the conventional explana