"Among the number which I got, five were fresh and the rest stinking and headless."
They remind us of His Grace's observation of some pages back.
According to Dr. Buist, some of these fishes weighed one and a half pounds each and others three pounds.
A fall of fishes at Futtepoor, India, May 16, 1833:
"They were all dead and dry." (Dr. Buist, _Living Age_, 52-186.)
India is far away: about 1830 was long ago.
A correspondent writes, from the Dove Marine Laboratory, Cuttercoats, England, that, at Hindon, a suburb of Sunderland, Aug. 24, 1918, hundreds of small fishes, identified as sand eels, had fallen--
Again the small area: about 60 by 30 yards.
The fall occurred during a heavy rain that was accompanied by thunder--or indications of disturbance aloft--but by no visible lightning. The sea is close to Hindon, but if you try to think of these fishes having described a trajectory in a whirlwind from the ocean, consider this remarkable datum:
That, according to witnesses, the fall upon this small area occupied ten minutes.
I cannot think of a clearer indication of a direct fall from a stationary source.
"The fish were all dead, and indeed stiff and hard, when picked up, immediately after the occurrence."
By all of which I mean that we have only begun to pile up our data of things that fall from a stationary source overhead: we'll have to take up the subject from many approaches before our acceptance, which seems quite as rigorously arrived at as ever has been a belief, can emerge from the accursed.
I don't know how much the horse and the barn will help us to emerge: but, if ever anything did go up from this earth's surface and stay up--those damned things may have:
In a tornado, in Wisconsin, May 23, 1878, "a barn and a horse were carried completely away, and neither horse nor barn, nor any portion of either have since been found."
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:
That, May 11, 1894, at Vicksburg, Miss., fell a small piece of alabaster; that, at Bovina, eight miles from Vicksburg, fell a gopher turtle.