But distinctly enough, we are told of one red rain that it was of
corpuscular composition--red snow, rather. It fell, March 12, 1876, near
the Crystal Palace, London (_Year Book of Facts_, 1876-89; _Nature_,
13-414). As to the "red snow" of polar and mountainous regions, we have
no opposition, because that "snow" has never been seen to fall from the
sky: it is a growth of micro-organisms, or of a "protococcus," that
spreads over snow that is on the ground. This time nothing is said of
"sand from the Sahara." It is said of the red matter that fell in
London, March 12, 1876, that it was composed of corpuscles--
Of course:
That they looked like "vegetable cells."
A note:
That nine days before had fallen the red substance--flesh--whatever it
may have been--of Bath County, Kentucky.
I think that a super-egotist, vast, but not so vast as it had supposed,
had refused to move to one side for a comet.
We summarize our general super-geographical expressions:
Gelatinous regions, sulphurous regions, frigid and tropical regions: a
region that has been Source of Life relatively to this earth: regions
wherein there is density so great that things from them, entering this
earth's thin atmosphere, explode.
We have had a datum of explosive hailstones. We now have support to the
acceptance that they had been formed in a medium far denser than air of
this earth at sea-level. In the _Popular Science News_, 22-38, is an
account of ice that had been formed, under great pressure, in the
laboratory of the University of Virginia. When released and brought into
contact with ordinary air, this ice exploded.
And again the flesh-like substance that fell in Kentucky: its flake-like
formation. Here is a phenomenon that is familiar to us: it suggests
flattening, under pressure. But the extraordinary inference is--pressure
not equal on all sides. In the _Annual Record of Science_, 1873-350, it
is said that, in 1873, after a heavy thunderstorm in Louisiana, a
tremendous number of fish scales were found, for a distance of forty
miles, along the banks of the Mississippi River: bushels of them picked
up in single places: large scales that were said to be of the gar fish,
a fish that weighs from five to fifty pounds. It seems impossible to
accept this identification: one thinks of a substance that had been
pressed into flakes or scales. And round hailstones with wide thin
margins of ice irregularly around them--still, such hailstones seem to
me more like things that had been stationary: had been held in a field
of thin ice. In the _Illustrated London News_, 34-546, are drawings of
hailstones so margined, as if they had been held in a sheet of ice.
Some day we shall have an expression which will be, to our advanced
primitiveness, a great joy:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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