a
valley on the top of Mt. Blanc; atheists at a prayer meeting; ice in
India. For instance, chemical analysis can reveal that almost any dead
man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll say, because there is no stomach
without some iron, lead, tin, gold, arsenic in it and of it--which, of
course, in a broader sense, doesn't matter much, because a certain
number of persons must, as a restraining influence, be executed for
murder every year; and, if detectives aren't able really to detect
anything, illusion of their success is all that is necessary, and it is
very honorable to give up one's life for society as a whole.

The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictou sent a sample to the
Editor of the _Journal_. The Editor of course found pollen in it.

My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in it: that
nothing could very well fall through the air, in June, near the pine
forests of Nova Scotia, and escape all floating spores of pollen. But
the Editor does not say that this substance "contained" pollen. He
disregards "nitrogen, ammonia, and an animal odor," and says that the
substance was pollen. For the sake of our thirty or forty tokens of
liberality, or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really liberal, we
grant that the chemist of the first examination probably wouldn't know
an animal odor if he were janitor of a menagerie. As we go along,
however, there can be no such sweeping ignoring of this phenomenon:

The fall of animal-matter from the sky.

I'd suggest, to start with, that we'd put ourselves in the place of
deep-sea fishes:

How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above?

They wouldn't try--

Or it's easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes of a kind.

_Jour. Franklin Inst._, 90-11:

That, upon the 14th of February, 1870, there fell, at Genoa, Italy,
according to Director Boccardo, of the Technical Institute of Genoa, and
Prof. Castellani, a yellow substance. But the microscope revealed
numerous globules of cobalt blue, also corpuscles of a pearly color that
resembled starch. See _Nature_, 2-166.

_Comptes Rendus_, 56-972:

M. Bouis says of a substance, reddish varying to yellowish, that fell
enormously and successively, or upon April 30, May 1 and May 2, in
France and Spain, that it carbonized and spread the odor of charred
animal matter--that it was not pollen--that in alcohol it left a residue
of resinous matter.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of this m