on." We now have a good many
reported occurrences that were "investigated." Of things said to have
fallen from the sky, we make, in the usual scientific way, two
divisions: miscellaneous objects and substances, and symmetric objects
attributable to beings like human beings, sub-dividing into--wedges,
spheres, and disks.

_Jour. Roy. Met. Soc._, 14-207:

That, July 2, 1866, a correspondent to a London newspaper wrote that
something had fallen from the sky, during a thunderstorm of June 30,
1866, at Netting Hill. Mr. G.T. Symons, of _Symons' Meteorological
Magazine_, investigated, about as fairly, and with about as unprejudiced
a mind, as anything ever has been investigated.

He says that the object was nothing but a lump of coal: that next door
to the home of the correspondent coal had been unloaded the day before.
With the uncanny wisdom of the stranger upon unfamiliar ground that we
have noted before, Mr. Symons saw that the coal reported to have fallen
from the sky, and the coal unloaded more prosaically the day before,
were identical. Persons in the neighborhood, unable to make this simple
identification, had bought from the correspondent pieces of the object
reported to have fallen from the sky. As to credulity, I know of no
limits for it--but when it comes to paying out money for credulity--oh,
no standards to judge by, of course--just the same--

The trouble with efficiency is that it will merge away into excess. With
what seems to me to be super-abundance of convincingness, Mr. Symons
then lugs another character into his little comedy:

That it was all a hoax by a chemist's pupil, who had filled a capsule
with an explosive, and "during the storm had thrown the burning mass
into the gutter, so making an artificial thunderbolt."

Or even Shakespeare, with all his inartistry, did not lug in King Lear
to make Hamlet complete.

Whether I'm lugging in something that has no special meaning, myself, or
not, I find that this storm of June 30, 1866, was peculiar. It is
described in the London _Times_, July 2, 1866: that "during the storm,
the sky in many places remained partially clear while hail and rain were
falling." That may have more meaning when we take up the possible
extra-mundane origin of some hailstones, especially if they fall from a
cloudless sky. Mere suggestion, not worth much, that there may have been
falls of extra-mundane substances, in London, June 30, 1866.

Clinkers, said to have fallen, durin