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That Shower Of Flesh

That Shower Of Flesh image
Parent Issue
Day
31
Month
March
Year
1876
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

TJntil Kentucky (remarks the Chicago times) shnll have expèrienced a shower öf porter -house steak and mushrooma, pork and apple sauce, sirloin and onions, saddles of venison, or soniething neat, inexpensive and palatab'le öhe needn't boast. TJiat little rain of fiesh she had the other day near Mount Sterling was, for phenomena, nothing extraordinary. Not to niention pitchforks, which every one has seen it rain, there have been many times and in divers places extraordinary showers of one thing and another falling like gentle dew from Heaven and landing upen the justand unjust without regard to race, color or previous condition. We pass over the Biblical record i of showers of manna for the nourishment of the ehouen people, stones for the annihilation of the hosts opposed to Joshua, and üre and brimatone for the destruction of Washington and Brook- we mean Sodom and Gomorrah, and I come to more modern instances of j orological eccentricities. The Cincinnati Commercial hashunted up a column and more of them. Prof. Smith, of Louisville, to whom j speoimens of the Kentucky product were exhibited, was of opinión that the matter was the dried spawn of the frog, which had been taken up from ponds or swamps by strong currents of wind and, after having probably been carried a long distance, permitted to fall to the earth again. He cites a similar fall of fleshy substance in Ireland in 1675. The matter then deposited by the shower was glutinous, and, when exposed to flre, emitted an unpleasant odor. Flammarion gives a list of twenty-one showera of blood which have been obserred in Western Europe since the beginning of the present century. There have been records of such showers from the earliest times, and, during the ïniddle ages, they were believed to be direct manifestations offthe divine displeasure : "In the spring and f all of that year j there were unusual atmospheric j anees throughout Europe, disastrous hurricanes, whirlwinds, tempests, 1 tending from the western coast of Trance to Constantinople, and on the Atlantic i there were cyclones of extraordinary magnitude and power. The whirlwinds and hurricanss were sufficiently powerf ui to take up stratums of soü in sandy districts, together with such soft and viscid substances as inight be found in swampa, lagoons, stagnant pools, etc., and carry them high in air, to be deposited somewhere, of course. And this deposit took place in the south of France, extending from Mount Cenis southward to the Mediterranean. The showers were, as has always been the case, j larly called "showers of blood." At j Lyons the snbstance was deposited in the shape of a reddish slime. A battalion of soldiers on the Swiss frontier had their uniforma bespattered and im pregnated with it. At Valence the layer was so thick that the water-chutes and gutters had to be flushed to clean them. One scientist calculated that in the department of Drome alone seven hundred and twenty tons of slimy reddish subj stance were deposited. Another analyzed it and found in it seventy-three organic subatances, many of them peculiar to South America. It had, as was afterward found out, taken the substance four days to travel from South America to the south of France, at the j rate of ninety yards per second. AnI other remarkable shower, in 1862, feil in France, and Ehrenberg found in the substance deposited ïïot less than fortyfour organic form.s" These showers of blood descended, when the temperatura was sufflciently low, in the shape of red snow, and many were the pious and superstitious deductions drawn from the phenomenon, which, if the spirit of scientiflc inquiry ! had been awake, could have easily been S traced to natural causes. In Persia in 1824 and 1828 there were showers of nutritious lichens, which feil to the depth of flve or six feet and were eaten bycattle. Sulphur and lava have often I descended, and there have been showers of toads, locusts and various insects, not to mention eats and dogs, and, after the former, bootjacks and such handy furnishings of a bed-chamber.

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Subjects
Old News
Michigan Argus