Page Content (OCR)
Nature, 68-223: except sand-- of this earth: [p. 35] We're quite ready to accept excuses from the most high, though | do wonder whether we're quite so damned as we were, if we find ourselves in a gracious and tolerant mood toward the powers that condemn--but the tax that now comes upon our good manners and unwillingness to be too severe-- Another chemist. He says it was 23.49 per cent water and organic matter. He "identifies" this matter as sand from an African desert--but after deducting organic matter-- But you and | could be "identified" as sand from an African desert, after deducting all there is to us Why we cannot accept that this fall was of sand from the Sahara, omitting the obvious objection that in most parts the Sahara is not red at all, but is usually described as "dazzling white"-- The enormousness of it: that a whirlwind might have carried it, but that, in that case it would be no supposititious, or doubtfully identified whirlwind, but the greatest atmospheric cataclysm in the history Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 30-56: That, up to the 27th of February, this fall had continued in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Austria; that in some instances it was not sand, or that almost all the matter vas organic: that a vessel had reported the fall as occurring in the Atlantic Ocean, midway between Southampton and the Barbados. The calculation is given that, in England alone, 10,000,000 tons of matter had fallen. It had