Page Content (OCR)
[p. 110] substances, and symmetric objects attributable to beings like human beings, sub-dividing into--wedges, spheres, and disks. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 14-207: That, July 2, 1866, a correspondent to a London newspaper wrote that something had fallen from the sky, during a thunderstorm of June 30, 1866, at Notting Hill. Mr. G. T. Symons, of Symons' Meteorological Magazine, investigated, about as fairly, and with about as unprejudiced a mind, as anything ever has been investigated. He says that the object was nothing but a lump of coal: that next door to the home of the correspondent coal had been unloaded the day before. With the uncanny wisdom of the stranger upon unfamiliar ground that we have noted before, Mr. Symons saw that the coal reported to have fallen from the sky, and the coal unloaded more prosaically the day before, were identical. Persons in the neighborhood, unable to make this simple identification, had bought from the correspondent pieces of the object reported to have fallen from the sky. As to credulity, | know of no limits for it--but when it comes to paying out money for credulity--oh, no standards to judge by, of course--just the same-- The trouble with efficiency is that it will merge away into excess. With what seems to me to be super- abundance of convincingness, Mr. Symons then lugs another character into his little comedy: That it was all a hoax by a chemist's pupil, who had filled a capsule with an explosive, and "during the storm had thrown the burning mass into the gutter, so making an artificial thunderbolt." Or even Shakespeare, with all his inartistry, did not lug in King Lear to make Hamlet complete. Whether I'm lugging in something that has no special meaning, myself, or not, | find that this storm of June 30, 1866, was peculiar. It is described in the London Times, July 2, 1866: that "during the storm, the