The Book of the Damned

Our expression upon icicles: A vast field of aerial ice--it is inert to this earth's gravitation--but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth, and is susceptible to gravitation--by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles--then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles. Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said (Monthly Weather Review, June, 1882) that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circumference, the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters--that upon some of them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these objects were not hailstones. The only merger is that of knobby hailstones, or of large hailstones with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize--not forming by accretion--in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of such hailstones, see Nature, 61-594. Note the size--"some of them the size of turkeys' eggs." It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen, as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the under side of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations. Monthly Weather Review, June, 1889: That, at Oswego, N.Y., June 11, 1889, according to the Turin (N.Y.) Leader, there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that "resembled the fragments of icicles."