The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort Read Free Book Online

from the Monthly Weather Review, of hailstones the size of hens’ eggs. There is an account in Nature, Nov. 1, 1894, of hailstones that weighed almost two pounds each. See Chambers’ Encyclopedia for three-pounders. Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1870-479—two-pounders authenticated, and six-pounders reported. At Seringapatam, India, about the year 1800, fell a hailstone—
    I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned. I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages—but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.
    We laugh.
    Or snowflakes. Size of saucers. Said to have fallen at Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 24, 1891. One smiles.
    “In Montana, in the winter of 1887, fell snowflakes fifteen inches across, and eight inches thick.” (Monthly Weather Review, 1915-73.)
    In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.

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    Black rains—red rains—the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
    Jet-black snow—pink snow—blue hailstones—hailstones flavored like oranges.
    Punk and silk and charcoal.

    ###

    About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:
    In the first place there are no stones in the sky:
    Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.
    Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.
    In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness, in its aspect of isolation, I don’t know of anything that has been fought harder for than the notion of this earth’s unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionists’ explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed—only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.
    The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
    Lavoisier’s analysis “absolutely proved” that this stone had not fallen: that it had been struck by lightning.
    So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something—that had been upon the ground in the first place.
    But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did—or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them—
    Monthly Review, 1796-4 26
    “The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered. The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of the marvelous as almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents. Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold from it a proper degree of attention.”
    The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius—
    Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth’s surface by whirlwinds or by volcanic action.
    It’s more than one hundred and twenty years later. I know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.
    Falling stones had to be undamned—though still with a