thus cleared up the mystery:--"The
periwinkles are indeed wonderful. They descended, forsooth, in a heavy
rain-like shower on the field of Mr Peach, as a due punishment for his
disrespect to the virtues of our late queen. The shower was so intense,
that the umbrella of an old lady passing by was broken to pieces, and
the fragments lifted in the air by the whirlwind, which picked up all
the periwinkles on the neighbouring hills, and dropped them three inches
thick on Mr Peach's field! But you know the story of 'The Three Black
Crows;' and thus the whole is reduced to no periwinkle rain, no
whirlwind; but turns out to be our old friend _Helix virgata_, making
its annual pilgrimage in search of a mate, and occurring one in almost
every square inch in the field in question."

Provincial newspapers seem to have a special power of reporting such
natural history facts, which rarely survive investigation. The _Stroud
Free Press_, for May 23, 1851, tells us that "an extraordinary scene was
witnessed at Bradford, about twelve miles from Bristol, on Saturday
week, when that village was visited by a heavy shower of snails. They
might have been gathered by bushels." Mr J. W. Douglas, the eminent
entomologist, immediately asked some pertinent questions anent the
shower; but whether it was that the witnesses were grieved at his
profanely comparing such prodigies to Professors Morison and Holloway's
cures, or whether they had no more definite intelligence to communicate,
_certes_ echo answered not.

We fear we must give up snails. But frogs! everybody knows that toads
and frogs fall from the sky. According to travellers in tropical
America, the inhabitants of Portobello assert that every drop of rain is
changed into a toad; the more instructed, however, believe that the
spawn of these animals is raised with the vapour from the adjoining
swamps, and being driven in the clouds over the city, the ova are
hatched as they descend in rain. 'Tis certain that the streets after a
night of heavy rain are almost covered with the ill-favoured reptiles,
and it is impossible to walk without crushing them.[74] But heretic
philosophers point to the mature growth of the vermin, many of them
being six inches in length, and maintain that the clever hypothesis just
mentioned will scarcely account for the appearance of these.

In the _Leeds Mercury_ for June 1844, there occurred the following
statement:--"In the course of the afternoon of Monday last, du