There are some other data relative to the ball of quartz of Westmoreland. They're poor things. There's so little to them that they look like ghosts of the damned. However, ghosts, when multiplied, take on what is called substantiality—if the solidest thing conceivable, in quasi-existence, is only concentrated phantomosity. It is not only that there have been other reports of quartz that has fallen from the sky; there is another agreement. The round quartz object of Westmoreland, if broken open and separated from its loose nucleus, would be a round, hollow, quartz object. My pseudo-position is that two reports of similar extraordinary occurrences, one from England and one from Canada—are interesting.
Proc. Canadian Institute, 3-7-8:
That, at the meeting of the Institute, of Dec. 1, 1888, one of the members, Mr. J.A. Livingstone, exhibited a globular quartz body which he asserted had fallen from the sky. It had been split open. It was hollow.
But the other members of the Institute decided that the object was spurious, because it was not of "true meteoritic material."
No date; no place mentioned; we note the suggestion that it was only a geode, which had been upon the ground in the first place. Its crystalline lining was geode-like.
Quartz is upon the "index prohibitory" of Science. A monk who would read Darwin would sin no more than would a scientist who would admit that, except by the "up and down" process, quartz has ever fallen from the sky—but Continuity: it is not excommunicated if part of or incorporated in a baptized meteorite—St. Catherine's of Mexico, I think. It's as epicurean a distinction as any ever made by theologians. Fassig lists a quartz pebble, found in a hailstone (Bibliography, part 2-355). "Up and down," of course. Another object of quartzite was reported to have fallen, in the autumn of 1880, at Schroon Lake, N.Y.—said in the Scientific American, 43-272 to be a fraud—it was not—the usual. About the first of May, 1899, the newspapers published a story of a "snow-white" meteorite that had fallen, at Vincennes, Indiana. The Editor of the Monthly Weather Review (issue of April, 1899) requested the local observer, at Vincennes, to investigate. The Editor says that the thing was only a fragment of a quartz boulder. He says that anyone with at least a public school education should know better than to write that quartz has ever fallen from the sky.
Notes and Queries, 2-8-92:
That, in the Leyden Museum of Antiquities, there is a disk of quartz: 6 centimeters by 5 millimeters by about 5 centimeters; said to have fallen upon a plantation in the Dutch West Indies, after a meteoric explosion.
Bricks.
I think this is a vice we're writing. I recommend it to those who have hankered for a new sin. At first some of our data were of so frightful or ridiculous mien as to be hated, or eyebrowed, was only to be seen. Then some pity crept in? I think that we can now embrace bricks.