The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 119 of 376

Page 119 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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[p. 95] This matter of enormousness of numbers suggests to me something of a migratory nature--but that snakes in the United States do not migrate in the month of January, if ever. As to falls or flutterings of winged insects from the sky, prevailing notions of swarming would seem explanatory enough: nevertheless, in instances of ants, there are some peculiar circumstances. L'Astronomie, 1889-353: Fall of fishes, June 13, 1889, in Holland; ants, Aug. 1, 1889, Strasbourg; little toads, Aug. 2, 1889, Savoy. Fall of ants, Cambridge, England, summer of 1874--"some were wingless." (Scientific American, 30-193.) Enormous fall of ants, Nancy, France, July 21, 1887--"most of them were wingless." (Nature, 36-349.) Fall of enormous, unknown ants--size of wasps--Manitoba, June, 1895. (Sci. Amer., 72-385.) However, our expression will be: That wingless, larval forms of life, in numbers so enormous that migration from some place external to this earth is suggested, have fallen from the sky. That these "migrations"--if such can be our acceptance--have occurred at a time of hibernation and burial far in the ground of larvae in the northern latitudes of this earth; that there is significance in recurrence of these falls in the last of January--or that we have the square of an incredibility in such a notion as that of selection of larvae by whirlwinds, compounded with selection of the last of January.