71, it is
said that this substance--to the inhabitants of the region"--was
"immediately recognized" by scientists who examined it: and that "the
chemical analysis also identified it as a lichen."

This was back in the days when Chemical Analysis was a god. Since then
his devotees have been shocked and disillusioned. Just how a chemical
analysis could so botanize, I don't know--but it was Chemical Analysis
who spoke, and spoke dogmatically. It seems to me that the ignorance of
inhabitants, contrasting with the local knowledge of foreign scientists,
is overdone: if there's anything good to eat, within any distance
conveniently covered by a whirlwind--inhabitants know it. I have data of
other falls, in Persia and Asiatic Turkey, of edible substances. They
are all dogmatically said to be "manna"; and "manna" is dogmatically
said to be a species of lichens from the steppes of Asia Minor. The
position that I take is that this explanation was evolved in ignorance
of the fall of vegetable substances, or edible substances, in other
parts of the world: that it is the familiar attempt to explain the
general in terms of the local; that, if we shall have data of falls of
vegetable substance, in, say, Canada or India, they were not of lichens
from the steppes of Asia Minor; that, though all falls in Asiatic Turkey
and Persia are sweepingly and conveniently called showers of "manna,"
they have not been even all of the same substance. In one instance the
particles are said to have been "seeds." Though, in _Comptes Rendus_,
the substance that fell in 1841 and 1846 is said to have been
gelatinous, in the _Bull. Sci. Nat. de Neuchatel_, it is said to have
been of something, in lumps the size of a filbert, that had been ground
into flour; that of this flour had been made bread, very
attractive-looking, but flavorless.

The great difficulty is to explain segregation in these showers--

But deep-sea fishes and occasional falls, down to them, of edible
substances; bags of grain, barrels of sugar; things that had not been
whirled up from one part of the ocean-bottom, in storms or submarine
disturbances, and dropped somewhere else--

I suppose one thinks--but grain in bags never has fallen--

Object of Amherst--its covering like "milled cloth"--

Or barrels of corn lost from a vessel would not sink--but a host of them
clashing together, after a wreck--they burst open; the corn sinks, or
does when saturated; the barrel staves float longer-