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of paper? [p. 59] That it's too bad that no one ever looked to see--hieroglyphics?--something written upon these sheets If we have no very great variety of substances that have fallen to this earth; if, upon this earth's surface there is infinite variety of substances detachable by whirlwinds, two falls of such a rare substance as marsh paper would be remarkable. A writer in the Edinburgh Review, 87-194, says that, at the time of writing, he had before him a portion of a sheet of 200 square feet, of a substance that had fallen at Carolath, Silesia, in 1839--exactly similar to cotton-felt, of which clothing might have been made. The god Microscopic Examination had spoken. The substance consisted chiefly of conifervae. Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, 1847-pt. 1-193: That March 16, 1846--about the time of a fall of edible substance in Asia Minor--an olive-gray powder fell at Shanghai. Under the microscope, it was seen to be an aggregation of hairs of two kinds, black ones and rather thick white ones. They were supposed to be mineral fibers, but, when burned, they gave out "the common ammoniacal smell and smoke of burnt hair or feathers." The writer described the phenomenon as "a cloud of 3800 square miles of fibers, alkali, and sand." In a postscript, he says that other investigators, with more powerful microscopes, gave opinion that the fibers were not hairs; that the substance consisted chiefly of conifervae. Or the pathos of it, perhaps; or the dull and uninspired, but courageous persistence of the scientific: everything seemingly found out is doomed to be subverted--by more powerful microscopes and telescopes; by more refined, precise, searching means and methods--the new pronouncements irrepressibly bobbing up; their reception always as Truth at last; always the illusion of the final; very little of the Intermediatist spirit That the new that has displaced the old will itself some day be displaced; that it, too, will be recognized as myth-stuffBut that if phantoms climb, spooks of ladders are good enough for them.