We think of the ice fields above this earth: which do not, themselves,
fall to this earth, but from which water does fall--
_Popular Science News_, 35-104:
That, according to Prof. Luigi Palazzo, head of the Italian
Meteorological Bureau, upon May 15, 1890, at Messignadi, Calabria,
something the color of fresh blood fell from the sky.
This substance was examined in the public-health laboratories of Rome.
It was found to be blood.
"The most probable explanation of this terrifying phenomenon is that
migratory birds (quails or swallows) were caught and torn in a violent
wind."
So the substance was identified as birds' blood--
What matters it what the microscopists of Rome said--or had to say--and
what matters it that we point out that there is no assertion that there
was a violent wind at the time--and that such a substance would be
almost infinitely dispersed in a violent wind--that no bird was said to
have fallen from the sky--or said to have been seen in the sky--that not
a feather of a bird is said to have been seen--
This one datum:
The fall of blood from the sky--
But later, in the same place, blood again fell from the sky.
28
_Notes and Queries_, 7-8-508:
A correspondent who had been to Devonshire writes for information as to
a story that he had heard there: of an occurrence of about thirty-five
years before the date of writing:
Of snow upon the ground--of all South Devonshire waking up one morning
to find such tracks in the snow as had never before been heard
of--"clawed footmarks" of "an unclassifiable form"--alternating at huge
but regular intervals with what seemed to be the impression of the point
of a stick--but the scattering of the prints--amazing expanse of
territory covered--obstacles, such as hedges, walls, houses, seemingly
surmounted--
Intense excitement--that the track had been followed by huntsmen and
hounds, until they had come to a forest--from which the hounds had
retreated, baying and terrified, so that no one had dared to enter the
forest.
_Notes and Queries_, 7-9-18:
Whole occurrence well-remembered by a correspondent: a badger had left
marks in the snow: this was determined, and the excitement had "dropped
to a dead calm in a single day."
_Notes and Queries_, 7-9-70:
That for years a correspondent had had a tracing of the prints, which
his mother had taken from those in the snow in her garden, in Exmouth:
that they were hoof-like marks--but had been made by a biped.
_Notes and Queries_, 7-9-253:
Well remembered by another correspondent, who writes of the excitement
and consternation of "some classes." He says that a kangaroo had escaped
from a menagerie--"the footprints being so peculiar and far apart gave
rise to a scare that the devil was loose."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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