less."

They remind us of His Grace's observation of some pages back.

According to Dr. Buist, some of these fishes weighed one and a half
pounds each and others three pounds.

A fall of fishes at Futtepoor, India, May 16, 1833:

"They were all dead and dry." (Dr. Buist, _Living Age_, 52-186.)

India is far away: about 1830 was long ago.

_Nature_, Sept. 19, 1918-46:

A correspondent writes, from the Dove Marine Laboratory, Cuttercoats,
England, that, at Hindon, a suburb of Sunderland, Aug. 24, 1918,
hundreds of small fishes, identified as sand eels, had fallen--

Again the small area: about 60 by 30 yards.

The fall occurred during a heavy rain that was accompanied by
thunder--or indications of disturbance aloft--but by no visible
lightning. The sea is close to Hindon, but if you try to think of these
fishes having described a trajectory in a whirlwind from the ocean,
consider this remarkable datum:

That, according to witnesses, the fall upon this small area occupied ten
minutes.

I cannot think of a clearer indication of a direct fall from a
stationary source.

And:

"The fish were all dead, and indeed stiff and hard, when picked up,
immediately after the occurrence."

By all of which I mean that we have only begun to pile up our data of
things that fall from a stationary source overhead: we'll have to take
up the subject from many approaches before our acceptance, which seems
quite as rigorously arrived at as ever has been a belief, can emerge
from the accursed.

I don't know how much the horse and the barn will help us to emerge:
but, if ever anything did go up from this earth's surface and stay
up--those damned things may have:

_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1878:

In a tornado, in Wisconsin, May 23, 1878, "a barn and a horse were
carried completely away, and neither horse nor barn, nor any portion of
either have since been found."

After that, which would be a little strong were it not for a steady
improvement in our digestions that I note as we go along, there is
little of the bizarre or the unassimilable in the turtle that hovered
six months or so over a small town in Mississippi:

_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1894:

That, May 11, 1894, at Vicksburg, Miss., fell a small piece of
alabaster; that, at Bovina, eight miles from Vicksburg, fell a gopher
turtle.

They fell in a hailstorm.

This item was widely copied at the time: for instance, _Nature_, one of
the volumes of 1894, pag