After that, which would be a little strong were it not for a steady improvement in our digestions that I note as we go along, there is little of the bizarre or the unassimilable in the turtle that hovered six months or so over a small town in Mississippi: _Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1894: That, May 11, 1894, at Vicksburg, Miss., fell a small piece of alabaster; that, at Bovina, eight miles from Vicksburg, fell a gopher turtle. They fell in a hailstorm. This item was widely copied at the time: for instance, _Nature_, one of the volumes of 1894, page 430, and _Jour. Roy. Met. Soc._, 20-273. As to discussion--not a word. Or Science and its continuity with Presbyterianism--data like this are damned at birth. The _Weather Review_ does sprinkle, or baptize, or attempt to save, this infant--but in all the meteorological literature that I have gone through, after that date--not a word, except mention once or twice. The Editor of the _Review_ says: "An examination of the weather map shows that these hailstorms occur on the south side of a region of cold northerly winds, and were but a small part of a series of similar storms; apparently some special local whirls or gusts carried heavy objects from this earth's surface up to the cloud regions." Of all incredibilities that we have to choose from, I give first place to a notion of a whirlwind pouncing upon a region and scrupulously selecting a turtle and a piece of alabaster. This time, the other mechanical thing "there in the first place" cannot rise in response to its stimulus: it is resisted in that these objects were coated with ice--month of May in a southern state. If a whirlwind at all, there must have been very limited selection: there is no record of the fall of other objects. But there is no attempt in the _Review_ to specify a whirlwind. These strangely associated things were remarkably separated. They fell eight miles apart. Then--as if there were real reasoning--they must have been high to fall with such divergence, or one of them must have been carried partly horizontally eight miles farther than the other. But either supposition argues for power more than that of a local whirl or gust, or argues for a great, specific disturbance, of which there is no record--for the month of May, 1894. Nevertheless--as if I really were reasonable--I do feel that I have to accept that this turtle had been raised from this earth's surface, somewhere near Vicksburg--because the gopher turtle is common in the southern states. Then I think of a hurricane that occurred in the state of Mississippi weeks or months before May 11, 1894. No--I don't look for it--and inevitably find it.