The Book of the Damned

Science Gossip, 1886-238: That small snails, of a land species, had fallen near Redruth, Cornwall, July 8, 1886, "during a heavy thunderstorm": roads and fields strewn with them, so that they were gathered up by the hatful: none seen to fall by the writer of this account: snails said to be "quite different to any previously known in this district." But, upon page 282, we have better orthodoxy. Another correspondent writes that he had heard of the supposed fall of snails: that he had supposed that all such stories had gone the way of witch stories; that, to his astonishment, he had read an account of this absurd story in a local newspaper of "great and deserved repute." "I thought I should for once like to trace the origin of one of these fabulous tales." Our own acceptance is that justice cannot be in an intermediate existence, in which there can be approximation only to justice or to injustice; that to be fair is to have no opinion at all; that to be honest is to be uninterested; that to investigate is to admit prejudice; that nobody has ever really investigated anything, but has always sought positively to prove or to disprove something that was conceived of, or suspected, in advance. "As I suspected," says this correspondent, "I found that the snails were of a familiar land-species"--that they had been upon the ground "in the first place." He found that the snails had appeared after the rain: that "astonished rustics had jumped to the conclusion that they had fallen."