Trouble with this book is that we'll end up a lot of intellectual roues: we'll be incapable of being astonished with anything. We knew, to start with, that science and imbecility are continuous; nevertheless so many expressions of the merging-point are at first startling. We did think that Prof. Hitchcock's performance in identifying the Amherst phenomenon as a fungus was rather notable as scientific vaudeville, if we acquit him of the charge of seriousness--or that, in a place where fungi were so common that, before a given evening two of them sprang up, only he, a stranger in this very fungiferous place, knew a fungus when he saw something like a fungus--if we disregard its quick liquefaction, for instance. It was only a monologue, however: now we have an all-star cast: and they're not only Irish; they're royal Irish. The royal Irishmen excluded "coal-blackness" and included fibrousness: so then that this substance was "marsh paper," which "had been raised into the air by storms of wind, and had again fallen." Second act: It was said that, according to M. Ehrenberg, "the meteor-paper was found to consist partly of vegetable matter, chiefly of conifervae." Third act: Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen: Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited. Their composition was chiefly of conifervae. This was a double inclusion: or it's the method of agreement that logicians make so much of. So no logician would be satisfied with identifying a peanut as a camel, because both have humps: he demands accessory agreement--that both can live a long time without water, for instance. Now, it's not so very unreasonable, at least to the free and easy vaudeville standards that, throughout this book, we are considering, to think that a green substance could be snatched up from one place in a whirlwind, and fall as a black substance somewhere else: but the royal Irishmen excluded something else, and it is a datum that was as accessible to them as it is to me: That, according to Chladni, this was no little, local deposition that was seen to occur by some indefinite person living near a pond somewhere. It was a tremendous fall from a vast sky-area. Likely enough all the marsh paper in the world could not have supplied it. At the same time, this substance was falling "in great quantities," in Norway and Pomerania. Or see Kirkwood, _Meteoric Astronomy_, p. 66: "Substance like charred paper fell in Norway and other parts of northern Europe, Jan. 31, 1686." Or a whirlwind, with a distribution as wide as that, would not acceptably, I should say, have so specialized in the rare substance called "marsh paper." There'd have been falls of fence rails, roofs of houses, parts of trees. Nothing is said of the occurrence of a tornado in northern Europe, in January, 1686. There is record only of this one substance having fallen in various places.