The Book of the Damned

That Mr. H.H. Garland, of Nelson County, Virginia, had found a jelly-like substance of about the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece: That, according to a communication from A.C. Twining to Prof. Olmstead, a woman at West Point, N.Y., had seen a mass the size of a teacup. It looked like boiled starch: That, according to a newspaper, of Newark, N.J., a mass of gelatinous substance, like soft soap, had been found. "It possessed little elasticity, and, on the application of heat, it evaporated as readily as water." It seems incredible that a scientist would have such hardihood, or infidelity, as to accept that these things had fallen from the sky: nevertheless, Prof. Olmstead, who collected these lost souls, says: "The fact that the supposed deposits were so uniformly described as gelatinous substance forms a presumption in favor of the supposition that they had the origin ascribed to them." In contemporaneous scientific publications considerable attention was given to Prof. Olmstead's series of papers upon this subject of the November meteors. You will not find one mention of the part that treats of gelatinous matter. 5