The Book of the Damned

As I said before, this expression is meaningless as to a few instances; it is reasonable to think of some coincidence between the fall of hail and the fall of other things: but, inasmuch as there have been a good many instances,--we begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences. If not conceivably could very large hailstones and lumps of ice form in this earth's atmosphere, and so then had to come from external regions, then other things in or accompanying very large hailstones and lumps of ice came from external regions--which worries us a little: we may be instantly translated to the Positive Absolute. Cosmos, 13-120, quotes a Virginia newspaper, that fishes said to have been catfishes, a foot long, some of them, had fallen, in 1853, at Norfolk, Virginia, with hail. Vegetable debris, not only nuclear, but frozen upon the surfaces of large hailstones, at Toulouse, France, July 28, 1874. (La Science Pour Tous, 1874-270.) Description of a storm, at Pontiac, Canada, July 11, 1864, in which it is said that it was not hailstones that fell, but "pieces of ice, from half an inch to over two inches in diameter" (Canadian Naturalist, 2-1-308): "But the most extraordinary thing is that a respectable farmer, of undoubted veracity, says he picked up a piece of hail, or ice, in the center of which was a small green frog." Storm at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, in which fell hailstones and pieces of ice (Monthly Weather Review, June, 1882):