The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 116 of 376

Page 116 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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deserved repute." [p. 93] Nature, 47-278: that, to his astonishment, he had read an account of this absurd story in a local newspaper of "great and "| thought | should for once like to trace the origin of one of these fabulous tales." Our own acceptance is that justice cannot be in an intermediate existence, in which there can be approximation only to justice or to injustice; that to be fair is to have no opinion at all; that to be honest is to be uninterested; that to investigate is to admit prejudice; that nobody has ever really investigated anything, but has always sought positively to prove or to disprove something that was conceived of, or suspected, in advance. "As | suspected," says this correspondent, "| found that the snails were of a familiar land-species"--that they had been upon the ground "in the first place." He found that the snails had appeared after the rain: that "astonished rustics had jumped to the conclusion that they had fallen." He met one person who said that he had seen the snails fall. "This was his error," says the investigator. In the Philosophical Magazine, 58-310, there is an account of snails said to have fallen at Bristol in a field of three acres, in such quantities that they were shoveled up. It is said that the snails "may be considered as a local species." Upon page 457, another correspondent says that the numbers had been exaggerated, and that in his opinion they had been upon the ground in the first place. But that there had been some unusual condition aloft comes out in his observation upon "the curious azure-blue appearance of the sun, at the time."