But it's my acceptance that a great deal of scientific literature must be read between the lines. It's not everyone who has the lamentableness of a Sir John Evans. Just as a great deal of Voltaire's meaning was inter-linear, we suspect that a Captain Duff merely hints rather than to risk having a Prof. Lawrence Smith fly at him and call him "a half-insane man." Whatever Captain Duff's meaning may have been, and whether he smiled like a Voltaire when he wrote it, Captain Duff writes of "the extremely soft nature of the stone, rendering it equally useless as an offensive or defensive weapon." Story, by a correspondent, in _Nature_, 34-53, of a Malay, of "considerable social standing"--and one thing about our data is that, damned though they be, they do so often bring us into awful good company--who knew of a tree that had been struck, about a month before, by something in a thunderstorm. He searched among the roots of this tree and found a "thunderstone." Not said whether he jumped or leaped to the conclusion that it had fallen: process likely to be more leisurely in tropical countries. Also I'm afraid his way of reasoning was not very original: just so were fragments of the Bath-furnace meteorite, accepted by orthodoxy, discovered. We shall now have an unusual experience. We shall read of some reports of extraordinary circumstances that were investigated by a man of science--not of course that they were really investigated by him, but that his phenomena occupied a position approximating higher to real investigation than to utter neglect. Over and over we read of extraordinary occurrences--no discussion; not even a comment afterward findable; mere mention occasionally--burial and damnation. The extraordinary and how quickly it is hidden away. Burial and damnation, or the obscurity of the conspicuous. We did read of a man who, in the matter of snails, did travel some distance to assure himself of something that he had suspected in advance; and we remember Prof. Hitchcock, who had only to smite Amherst with the wand of his botanical knowledge, and lo! two fungi sprang up before night; and we did read of Dr. Gray and his thousands of fishes from one pailful of water--but these instances stand out; more frequently there was no "investigation." We now have a good many reported occurrences that were "investigated." Of things said to have fallen from the sky, we make, in the usual scientific way, two divisions: miscellaneous objects and substances, and symmetric objects attributable to beings like human beings, sub-dividing into--wedges, spheres, and disks. _Jour. Roy. Met. Soc._, 14-207: That, July 2, 1866, a correspondent to a London newspaper wrote that something had fallen from the sky, during a thunderstorm of June 30, 1866, at Netting Hill. Mr. G.T. Symons, of _Symons' Meteorological Magazine_, investigated, about as fairly, and with about as unprejudiced a mind, as anything ever has been investigated.