The parson began to discuss the clouds in Lappmark and told me how they touch the mountains, picking up rocks, trees and animals which they then carry off. I ascribed this, as seemed most likely, to the strength of the wind and said that clouds do not pick things up. He smiled at me and said that I had never seen such a cloud (since I had not even been in the mountains). “Yes I have,” I answered, “and when it is misty there, I am actually walking in cloud, and when the mist is falling straight down, then it is raining below me”. He smiled a sardonic smile at such intellectual embroidery. Even less to his liking was my discourse on globules of water being taken up into the atmosphere and he informed me that the clouds were solid. When I rejected this, he supported his case with a passage of Scripture, smiled at my simplicity and said that he would, moreover, like to inform me that there is a kind of slime that, after there has been rain, permanently covers the mountains in the places where the clouds have touched. When I said that this was called Nostoc and that it was vegetable matter, I was judged to be crazy like St Paul, and he said that too much learning had made me mad.1 He even sneered at those natural philosophers who try to understand everything through reason, as Sturmius did in the case of flight with hollow spheres.2 He advised me rather to put my trust in people who understood such things and not to write a thesis full of all such lunacy as soon as I got home.