s--red rains--the fall of a thousand tons of butter.

Jet-black snow--pink snow--blue hailstones--hailstones flavored like
oranges.

Punk and silk and charcoal.

* * * * *

About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that
stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:

In the first place there are no stones in the sky:

Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.

Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be
said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble: that
the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between
realness and unrealness.

In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by
the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from
the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness, in its aspect
of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for
than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the
stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that
stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall,
and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly
had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.

The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.

Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen:
that it had been struck by lightning.

So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of
exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike
something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.

But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not
customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence
of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them
bombarded the walls raised against them--

_Monthly Review_, 1796-426

"The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem
to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered.
The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause
of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of the marvelous as
almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents.
Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have
actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold from it a proper
degree