The Book of the Damned

An account by M. Acharius, in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1808-215, translated for the North American Review, 3-319: That M. Acharius, having heard of "an extraordinary and probably hitherto unseen phenomenon," reported from near the town of Skeninge, Sweden, investigated: That, upon the 16th of May, 1808, at about 4 P.M., the sun suddenly turned dull brick-red. At the same time there appeared, upon the western horizon, a great number of round bodies, dark brown, and seemingly the size of a hat crown. They passed overhead and disappeared in the eastern horizon. Tremendous procession. It lasted two hours. Occasionally one fell to the ground. When the place of a fall was examined, there was found a film, which soon dried and vanished. Often, when approaching the sun, these bodies seemed to link together, or were then seen to be linked together, in groups not exceeding eight, and, under the sun, they were seen to have tails three or four fathoms long. Away from the sun the tails were invisible. Whatever their substance may have been, it is described as gelatinous--"soapy and jellied." I place this datum here for several reasons. It would have been a good climax to our expression upon hordes of small bodies that, in our acceptance, were not seeds, nor birds, nor ice-crystals: but the tendency would have been to jump to the homogeneous conclusion that all our data in that expression related to this one kind of phenomena, whereas we conceive of infinite heterogeneity of the external: of crusaders and rabbles and emigrants and tourists and dragons and things like gelatinous hat crowns. Or that all things, here, upon this earth, that flock together, are not necessarily sheep, Presbyterians, gangsters, or porpoises. The datum is important to us, here, as indication of disruption in this earth's atmosphere--dangers in entering this earth's atmosphere.