The Book of the Damned

in instances of ants, there are some peculiar circumstances.

L’Astronomie, 1889-353:

Fall of fishes, June 13, 1889, in Holland; ants, Aug. 1, 1889, Strasbourg; little toads, Aug. 2, 1889, Savoy.

Fall of ants, Cambridge, England, summer of 1874—"some were wingless." (Scientific American, 30-193.) Enormous fall of ants, Nancy, France, July 21, 1887—"most of them were wingless." (Nature, 36-349.) Fall of enormous, unknown ants—size of wasps—Manitoba, June, 1895. (Sci. Amer., 72-385.)

However, our expression will be:

That wingless, larval forms of life, in numbers so enormous that migration from some place external to this earth is suggested, have fallen from the sky.

That these "migrations"—if such can be our acceptance—have occurred at a time of hibernation and burial far in the ground of larvae in the northern latitudes of this earth; that there is significance in recurrence of these falls in the last of January—or that we have the square of an incredibility in such a notion as that of selection of larvae by whirlwinds, compounded with selection of the last of January.

I accept that there are "snow worms" upon this earth—whatever their origin may have been. In the Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia, 1899-125, there is a description of yellow worms and black worms that have been found together on glaciers in Alaska. Almost positively were there no other forms of insect-life upon these glaciers, and there was no vegetation to support insect-life, except microscopic organisms. Nevertheless the description of this probably polymorphic species fits a description of larvae said to have fallen in Switzerland, and less definitely fits another description. There is no opposition here, if our data of falls are clear. Frogs of every-day ponds look like frogs said to have fallen from the sky—except the whitish frogs of Birmingham. However, all falls of larvae have not positively occurred in the last of January:

London Times, April 14, 1837:

That, in the parish of Bramford Speke, Devonshire, a large number of black worms, about three-quarters of an inch in length, had fallen in a snowstorm.