The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 219 of 376

Page 219 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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A footnote: [p. 178] for a long time. "An interesting, but unconfirmed, account stated that small pebbles were found at the center of some of the larger hail gathered at Annapolis. The young man who related the story offered to produce the pebbles, but has not done so." "Since writing this, the author states that he has received some of the pebbles." When a young man "produces" pebbles, that's as convincing as anything else I've ever heard of, though no more convincing than, if having told of ham sandwiches falling from the sky, he should "produce" ham sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted by us, we correlate it with a datum reported by a Weather Bureau observer, signifying that, whether the pebbles had been somewhere aloft a long time or not, some of the hailstones that fell with them, had been. The datum is that some of these hailstones were corn-posed of from twenty to twenty-five layers alternately of clear ice and snow-ice. In orthodox terms | argue that a fair-sized hailstone falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to warm it so that it would not take on even one layer of ice. To put on twenty layers of ice, | conceive of something that had not fallen at all, but had rolled somewhere, at a leisurely rate, We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two respects: Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Orenburg, Russia, September, 1824 (Phil. Mag., 4-8-463). A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25, 1825 (Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 1828-1-447). | now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first | came upon these data | was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects of Orenburg were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of iron. |