The Book of the Damned

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:

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

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