Prof. Fassig lists the substance, in his "Bibliography," as fish spawn.
McAtee (_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1918) lists it as a jelly-like
material, supposed to have been the "dried" spawn either of fishes or of
some batrachian.
Or this is why, against the seemingly insuperable odds against all
things new, there can be what is called progress--
That nothing is positive, in the aspects of homogeneity and unity:
If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only unreal
combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity. Every resistance
is itself divided into parts resisting one another. The simplest
strategy seems to be--never bother to fight a thing: set its own parts
fighting one another.
We are merging away from carnal to gelatinous substance, and here there
is an abundance of instances or reports of instances. These data are so
improper they're obscene to the science of today, but we shall see that
science, before it became so rigorous, was not so prudish. Chladni was
not, and Greg was not.
I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often
fallen from the sky--
Or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous?
That meteors tear through and detach fragments?
That fragments are brought down by storms?
That the twinkling of stars is penetration of light through something
that quivers?
I think, myself, that it would be absurd to say that the whole sky is
gelatinous: it seems more acceptable that only certain areas are.
Humboldt (_Cosmos_, 1-119) says that all our data in this respect must
be "classed amongst the mythical fables of mythology." He is very sure,
but just a little redundant.
We shall be opposed by the standard resistances:
There in the first place;
Up from one place, in a whirlwind, and down in another.
We shall not bother to be very convincing one way or another, because of
the over-shadowing of the datum with which we shall end up. It will mean
that something had been in a stationary position for several days over a
small part of a small town in England: this is the revolutionary thing
that we have alluded to before; whether the substance were nostoc, or
spawn, or some kind of a larval nexus, doesn't matter so much. If it
stood in the sky for several days, we rank with Moses as a chronicler of
improprieties--or was that story, or datum, we mean, told by Moses? Then
we shall have so many records of gelatinous substance said to have
fallen with meteorites, that, between the two phenomena, some of us will
have to accept connection--or that there are at least vast gelatinous
areas aloft, and that meteorites tear through, carrying down some of the
substance.
_Comptes Rendus_, 3-554:
That, in 1836, M. Vallot, member of the French Academy, placed before
the Academy some fragments of a gelatinous substance, said to have
fallen from the sky, and asked that they be analyzed. There is no
further allusion to this subject.
_Comptes Rendus_, 23-542:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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