form in thin sheets upon marsh land.

It looks like greenish felt.

The substance of Memel:

Damp, coal-black, leafy mass.

But, if broken up, the marsh-substance is flake-like, and it tears
fibrously.

An elephant can be identified as a sunflower--both have long stems. A
camel is indistinguishable from a peanut--if only their humps be
considered.

Trouble with this book is that we'll end up a lot of intellectual roues:
we'll be incapable of being astonished with anything. We knew, to start
with, that science and imbecility are continuous; nevertheless so many
expressions of the merging-point are at first startling. We did think
that Prof. Hitchcock's performance in identifying the Amherst phenomenon
as a fungus was rather notable as scientific vaudeville, if we acquit
him of the charge of seriousness--or that, in a place where fungi were
so common that, before a given evening two of them sprang up, only he, a
stranger in this very fungiferous place, knew a fungus when he saw
something like a fungus--if we disregard its quick liquefaction, for
instance. It was only a monologue, however: now we have an all-star
cast: and they're not only Irish; they're royal Irish.

The royal Irishmen excluded "coal-blackness" and included fibrousness:
so then that this substance was "marsh paper," which "had been raised
into the air by storms of wind, and had again fallen."

Second act:

It was said that, according to M. Ehrenberg, "the meteor-paper was found
to consist partly of vegetable matter, chiefly of conifervae."

Third act:

Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen:

Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited.

Their composition was chiefly of conifervae.

This was a double inclusion: or it's the method of agreement that
logicians make so much of. So no logician would be satisfied with
identifying a peanut as a camel, because both have humps: he demands
accessory agreement--that both can live a long time without water, for
instance.

Now, it's not so very unreasonable, at least to the free and easy
vaudeville standards that, throughout this book, we are considering, to
think that a green substance could be snatched up from one place in a
whirlwind, and fall as a black substance somewhere else: but the royal
Irishmen excluded something else, and it is a datum that was as
accessible to them as it is to me:

That, according to Chladni, this was no little, local deposition that
was seen to occur