The Book of the Damned

In the Monthly Weather Review there is no mention of other falls said to have occurred anywhere in January, 1877. Again ours is the objection against such selectiveness by a whirlwind. Conceivably a whirlwind could scoop out a den of hibernating snakes, with stones and earth and an infinitude of other debris, snatching up dozens of snakes--I don't know how many to a den--hundreds maybe--but, according to the account of this occurrence in the New York Times, there were thousands of them; alive; from one foot to eighteen inches in length. The Scientific American, 36-86, records the fall, and says that there were thousands of them. The usual whirlwind-explanation is given--"but in what locality snakes exist in such abundance is yet a mystery." This matter of enormousness of numbers suggests to me something of a migratory nature--but that snakes in the United States do not migrate in the month of January, if ever. As to falls or flutterings of winged insects from the sky, prevailing notions of swarming would seem explanatory enough: nevertheless, in instances of ants, there are some peculiar circumstances. L'Astronomie, 1889-353: Fall of fishes, June 13, 1889, in Holland; ants, Aug. 1, 1889, Strasbourg; little toads, Aug. 2, 1889, Savoy. Fall of ants, Cambridge, England, summer of 1874--"some were 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.