Book of the Damned Chapter I

A PROCESSION of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them--or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.

A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.

The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.

The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.

The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.

But they'll march.

The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries--but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming.

The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.

* * *

So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.

But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.

Or everything that is, won't be.

And everything that isn't, will be --

But, of course, will be that which won't be --

It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.

* * *

It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called "being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded.

But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.

Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange.

So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line.

As we go along, we shall be impressed with this:

That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more reasonable than that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived of.

Science has, by appeal to various bases, included a multitude of data. Had it not done so, there would be nothing with which to seem to be. Science has, by appeal to various bases, excluded a multitude of data. Then, if redness is continuous with yellowness: if every basis of admission is continuous with every basis of exclusion, Science must have excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness and yellowness, which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all standards, all means of forming an opinion --

Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the fallacy that there are positive differences to judge by --

That the quest of all intellection has been for something--a fact, a basis, a generalization, law, formula, a major premise that is positive: that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things are self-evident--whereas, by evidence we mean the support of something else --

That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been attained.

What is a house?

It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences.

A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos--or a shell is a house to a hermit crab--or was to the mollusk that made it--or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the sea-shore are seen to be continuous.

So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions.

White coral islands in a dark blue sea.

Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of positive difference one from another--but all are only projections from the same sea bottom. The difference between sea and land is not positive. In all water there is some earth: in all earth there is some water.

So then that all seeming things are not things at all, if all are inter-continuous, any more than is the leg of a table a thing in itself, if it is only a projection from something else: that not one of us is a real person, if, physically, we're continuous with environment; if, psychically, there is nothing to us but expression of relation to environment.

Our general expression has two aspects:

Conventional monism, or that all "things" that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying, and have no real outlines of their own.

But that all "things," though only projections, are projections that are striving to break away from the underlying that denies them identity of their own.

I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, in which and of which, all seeming things are only different expressions, but in which all things are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things, or to establish entity or positive difference or final demarcation or unmodified independence--or personality or soul, as it is called in human phenomena --

That anything that tries to establish itself as a real, or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other "things":

That, if it does not so act, it can not seem to be;

That, if it does so act, it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and disastrously acts, just as would one who draws a circle in the sea, including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different.

Our expression is that our whole existence is animation of the local by an ideal that is realizable only in the universal:

That, if all exclusions are false, because always are included and excluded continuous: that if all seeming of existence perceptible to us is the product of exclusion, there is nothing that is perceptible to us that really is: that only the universal can really be.

Our especial interest is in modern science as a manifestation of this one ideal or purpose or process:

That it has falsely excluded, because there are no positive standards to judge by: that it has excluded things that, by its own pseudostandards, have as much right to come in as have the chosen.

* * *

Our general expression:

That the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a flow, or a current, or an attempt, from negativeness to positiveness, and is intermediate to both.

By positiveness we mean:

Harmony, equilibrium, order, regularity, stability, consistency, unity, realness, system, government, organization, liberty, independence, soul, self, personality, entity, individuality, truth, beauty, justice, perfection, definiteness --

That all that is called development, progress, or evolution is movement toward, or attempt toward, this state for which, or for aspects of which, there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one word "positiveness."

At first this summing up may not be very readily acceptable. At first it may seem that all these words are not synonyms: that "harmony" may mean "order," but that by "independence," for instance, we do not mean "truth," or that by "stability" we do not mean "beauty," or "system," or "justice."

I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, which expresses itself in astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in various fields of phenomena--which are only quasi-different--we give different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and its management, we see that the words are interchangeable. It used to be customary to speak of chemic equilibrium, but not of social equilibrium: that false demarcation has been broken down. We shall see that by all these words we mean the same state. As every-day conveniences, or in terms of common illusions, of course, they are not synonyms. To a child an earth worm is not an animal. It is to a biologist.

By "beauty," I mean that which seems complete.

Obversely, that the incomplete, or the mutilated, is the ugly.

Venus de Milo.

To a child she is ugly.

When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

A hand thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful.

Found on a battlefield--obviously a part--not beautiful.

But everything in our experience is only a part of something else that in turn is only a part of still something else--or that there is nothing beautiful in our experience: only appearances that are intermediate to beauty and ugliness--that only universality is complete: that only the complete is the beautiful: that every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give the local the attribute of the universal.

By stability, we mean the immovable and the unaffected. But all seeming things are only reactions to something else. Stability, too, then, can be only the universal, or that besides which there is nothing else. Though some things seem to have--or have--higher approximations to stability than have others, there are, in our experience, only various degrees of intermediateness to stability and instability. Every man, then, who works for stability under its various names of "permanency," "survival," "duration," is striving to localize in something the state that is realizable only in the universal.

By independence, entity, and individuality, I can mean only that besides which there is nothing else, if given only two things, they must be continuous and mutually affective, if everything is only a reaction to something else, and any two things would be destructive of each other's independence, entity, or individuality.

All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to Order and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations with outside forces. All are attempted completenesses. If to all local phenomena there are always outside forces, these attempts, too, are realizable only in the state of completeness, or that to which there are no outside forces.

Or that all these words are synonyms, all meaning the state that we call the positive state --

That our whole "existence" is a striving for the positive state.

The amazing paradox of it all:

That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding other things.

That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all expressions, in all fields of phenomena, of that which we think of as one inter-continuous nexus:

The religious and their idea or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct, stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not mere flux of vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with environment, merging away with an infinitude of other interdependent complexes.

But the only thing that would not merge away into something else would be that besides which there is nothing else.

That Truth is only another name for the positive state, or that the quest for Truth, is the attempt to achieve positiveness:

Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete --

By Truth I mean the Universal.

So chemists have sought the true, or the real, and have always failed in their endeavors, because of the outside relations of chemical phenomena: have failed in the sense that never has a chemical law, without exceptions, been discovered: because chemistry is continuous with astronomy, physics, biology--For instance, if the sun should greatly change its distance from this earth, and if human life could survive, the familiar chemic formulas would no longer work out: a new science of chemistry would have to be learned --

Or that all attempts to find Truth in the special are attempts to find the universal in the local.

And artists and their striving for positiveness, under the name of "harmony"--but their pigments that are oxydizing, or are responding to a deranging environment--or the strings of musical instruments that are differently and disturbingly adjusting to outside chemic and thermal and gravitational forces--again and again this oneness of all ideals, and that it is the attempt to be, or to achieve, locally, that which is realizable only universally. In our experience there is only intermediateness to harmony and discord. Harmony is that besides which there are no outside forces.

And nations that have fought with only one motive: for individuality, or entity, or to be real, final nations, not subordinate to, or parts of, other nations. And that nothing but intermediateness has ever been attained, and that history is record of failures of this one attempt, because there always have been outside forces, or other nations contending for the same goal.

As to physical things, chemic, mineralogic, astronomic, it is not customary to say that they act to achieve Truth or Entity, but it is understood that all motions are toward Equilibrium: that there is no motion except toward Equilibrium, of course always away from some other approximation to Equilibrium.

All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments.

Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.

But that all that we call "being" is motion: and that all motion is the expression, not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibrium unattained: that life-motions are expressions of equilibrium unattained: that all thought relates to the unattained: that to have what is called being in our quasi-state, is not to be in the positive sense, or is to be intermediate to Equilibrium and Inequilibrium.

So then:

That all phenomena in our intermediate state, or quasi-state, represent this one attempt to organize, stabilize, harmonize, individualize--or to positivize, or to become real:

That only to have seeming is to express failure or intermediateness to final failure and final success;

That every attempt--that is observable--is defeated by Continuity, or by outside forces--or by the excluded that are continuous with the included:

That our whole "existence" is an attempt by the relative to be the absolute, or by the local to be the universal.

In this book, my interest is in this attempt as manifested in modern science:

That it has attempted to be real, true, final, complete, absolute:

That, if the seeming of being, here, in our quasi-state, is the product of exclusion that is always false and arbitrary, if always are included and excluded continuous, the whole seeming system, or entity, of modern science is only quasi-system, or quasi-entity, wrought by the same false and arbitrary process as that by which the still less positive system that preceded it, or the theological system, wrought the illusion of its being.

In this book, I assemble some of the data that I think are of the falsely and arbitrarily excluded.

The data of the damned.

I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data.

They will march.

* * *

As to the logic of our expressions to come --

That there is only quasi-logic in our mode of seeming:

That nothing ever has been proved --

Because there is nothing to prove.

When I say that there is nothing to prove, I mean that to those who accept Continuity, or the merging away of all phenomena into other phenomena, without positive demarcations one from another, there is, in a positive sense, no one thing. There is nothing to prove.

For instance nothing can be proved to be an animal--because animalness and vegetableness are not positively different. There are some expressions of life that are as much vegetable as animal, or that represent the merging of animalness and vegetableness. There is then no positive test, standard, criterion, means of forming an opinion. As distinct from vegetables, animals do not exist. There is nothing to prove. Nothing could be proved to be good, for instance. There is nothing in our "existence" that is good, in a positive sense, or as really outlined from evil. If to forgive be good in times of peace, it is evil in wartime. There is nothing to prove: good in our experience is continuous with, or is only another aspect of evil.

As to what I am trying to do now--I accept only. If I can't see universally, I only localize.

So, of course then, that nothing ever has been proved:

That theological pronouncements are as much open to doubt as ever they were, but that, by a hypnotizing process, they became dominant over the majority of minds in their era;

That, in a succeeding era, the laws, dogmas, formulas, principles, of materialistic science never were proved, because they are only localizations simulating the universal; but that the leading minds of their era of dominance were hypnotized into more or less firmly believing them.

Newton's three laws, and that they are attempts to achieve positiveness, or to defy and break Continuity, and are as unreal as are all other attempts to localize the universal:

That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately, with all other bodies, it can not be influenced only by its own inertia, so that there is no way of knowing what the phenomena of inertia may be; that, if all things are reacting to an infinitude of forces, there is no way of knowing what the effects of only one impressed force would be; that if every reaction is continuous with its action, it can not be conceived of as a whole, and that there is no way of conceiving what it might be equal and opposite to --

Or that Newton's three laws are three articles of faith;

Or that demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all mythological characters;

But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly believed in as if they had been proved.

Enormities and preposterousnesses will march.

They will be "proved" as well as Moses or Darwin or Lyell ever "proved" anything.

* * *

We substitute acceptance for belief.

Cells of an embryo take on different appearances in different eras.

The more firmly established, the more difficult to change.

That social organism is embryonic.

That firmly to believe is to impede development.

That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.

* * *

But:

Except that we substitute acceptance for belief, our methods will be the conventional methods; the means by which every belief has been formulated and supported: or our methods will be the methods of theologians and savages and scientists and children. Because, if all phenomena are continuous, there can be no positively different methods. By the inconclusive means and methods of cardinals and fortune tellers and evolutionists and peasants, methods which must be inconclusive, if they relate always to the local, and if there is nothing local to conclude, we shall write this book.

If it function as an expression of its era, it will prevail.

* * *

All sciences begin with attempts to define.

Nothing ever has been defined.

Because there is nothing to define.

Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species."

He was never able to tell what he meant by a "species."

It is not possible to define.

Nothing has ever been finally found out.

Because there is nothing final to find out.

It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was --

But that all scientific attempts really to find out something, whereas really there is nothing to find out, are attempts, themselves, really to be something.

A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of possibilities--he may himself become Truth.

Or that science is more than an inquiry:

That it is a pseudo-construction, or a quasi-organization: that it is an attempt to break away and locally establish harmony, stability, equilibrium, consistency, entity --

Dimmest of possibilities--that it may succeed.

* * *

That ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake of its essential fictitiousness --

But that some appearances approximate far more highly to the positive state than do others.

We conceive of all "things" as occupying gradations, or steps in series between positiveness and negativeness, or realness and unrealness: that some seeming things are more nearly consistent, just, beautiful, unified, individual, harmonious, stable--than others.

We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists--that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.

So then:

That our whole quasi-existence is an intermediate stage between positiveness and negativeness or realness and unrealness.

Like purgatory, I think.

But in our summing up, which was very sketchily done, we omitted to make clear that Realness is an aspect of the positive state.

By Realness, I mean that which does not merge away into something else, and that which is not partly something else: that which is not a reaction to, or an imitation of, something else. By a real hero, we mean one who is not partly a coward, or whose actions and motives do not merge away into cowardice. But, if in Continuity, all things do merge, by Realness, I mean the Universal, besides which there is nothing with which to merge.

That, though the local might be universalized, it is not conceivable that the universal can be localized: but that high approximations there may be, and that these approximate successes may be translated out of Intermediateness into Realness--quite as, in a relative sense, the industrial world recruits itself by translating out of unrealness, or out of the seemingly less real imaginings of inventors, machines which seem, when set up in

factories, to have more of Realness than they had when only imagined.

That all progress, if all progress is toward stability, organization, harmony, consistency, or positiveness, is the attempt to become real.

So, then, in general metaphysical terms, our expression is that, like a purgatory, all that is commonly called "existence," which we call Intermediateness, is quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal, but expression of attempt to become real, or to generate for or recruit a real existence.

Our acceptance is that Science, though usually thought of so specifically, or in its own local terms, usually supposed to be a prying into old bones, bugs, unsavory messes, is an expression of this one spirit animating all Intermediateness: that, if Science could absolutely exclude all data but its own present data, or that which is assimilable with the present quasi-organization, it would be a real system, with positively definite outlines--it would be real.

Its seeming approximation to consistency, stability, system--positiveness or realness--is sustained by damning the irreconcilable or the unassimilable --

All would be well.

All would be heavenly --

If the damned would only stay damned.

Book of the Damned Chapter II

IN the autumn of 1883, and for years afterward, occurred brilliant-colored sunsets, such as had never been seen before, within the memory of all observers. Also there were blue moons.

I think that one is likely to smile incredulously at the notion of blue moons. Nevertheless they were as common as were green suns in 1883.

Science had to account for these unconventionalities. Such publications as Nature and Knowledge were besieged with inquiries.

I suppose, in Alaska and in the South Sea Islands, all the medicine men were similarly upon trial.

Something had to be thought of.

Upon the 28th of August, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa, of the Straits of Sunda, had blown up.

Terrific.

We're told that the sound was heard 2,000 miles, and that 36,380 persons were killed. Seems just a little unscientific, or impositive, to me: marvel to me we're not told 2,163 miles and 36,387 persons. The volume of smoke that went up must have been visible to other planets--or, tormented with our crawlings and scurryings, the earth complained to Mars; swore a vast black oath at us.

In all text-books that mention this occurrence--no exception so far so I have read--it is said that the extraordinary atmospheric effects of 1883 were first noticed in the last of August or the first of September.

That makes a difficulty for us.

It is said that these phenomena were caused by particles of volcanic dust that were cast high in the air by Krakatoa.

This is the explanation that was agreed upon in 1883 --

But for seven years the atmospheric phenomena continued --

Except that, in the seven, there was a lapse of several years--and where was the volcanic dust all that time?

You'd think that such a question as that would make trouble?

Then you haven't studied hypnosis. You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus. According to our general acceptance, it would be impossible to demonstrate such a thing. Point out a hundred reasons for saying that a hippopotamus is not a table: you'll end up agreeing that neither is a table a table--it only seems to be a table. Well, that's what the hippopotamus seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else, when neither is something else some other thing? There's nothing to prove.

This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance.

You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity. But Science is established preposterousness. We divide all intellection: the obviously preposterous and the established.

But Krakatoa: that's the explanation that the scientists gave. I don't know what whopper the medicine men told.

We see, from the start, the very strong inclination of science to deny, as much as it can, external relations of this earth.

This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth. We take the position that our data have been damned, upon no consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth. This is attempted positiveness. We take the position that science can no more succeed than, in a similar endeavor, could the Chinese, or than could the United States. So then, with only pseudo-consideration of the phenomena of 1883, or as an expression of positivism in its aspect of isolation, or unrelatedness, scientists have perpetrated such an enormity as suspension of volcanic dust seven years in the air--disregarding the lapse of several years--rather than to admit the arrival of dust from somewhere beyond this earth. Not that scientists themselves have ever achieved positiveness, in its aspect of unitedness, among themselves--because Nordenskiold, before 1883, wrote a great deal upon his theory of cosmic dust, and Prof. Cleveland Abbe contended against the Krakatoan explanation--but that this is the orthodoxy of the main body of scientists.

My own chief reason for indignation here:

That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities.

It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power.

Later, we shall have data of things that have gone up in the air and that have stayed up--somewhere--weeks--months--but not by the sustaining power of the earth's atmosphere. For instance, the turtle of Vicksburg. It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think of a good-sized turtle hanging, for three or four months, upheld only by the air, over the town of Vicksburg. When it comes to the horse and the barn--I think that they'll be classics some day, but I can never accept that a horse and a barn could float several months in this earth's atmosphere.

The orthodox explanation:

See the Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society. It comes out absolutely for the orthodox explanation--absolutely and beautifully, also expensively. There are 492 pages in the "Report," and 40 plates, some of them marvellously colored. It was issued after an investigation that took five years. You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and persistences --

Annual Register, 1883-105:

That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred;

Knowledge, 5-418:

That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption.

* * *

Inertia and its inhospitality.

Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.

We shall have a few data initiatorily.

I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities.

The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.

Hailstones, for instance. One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the size of hens' eggs. One smiles. Nevertheless I will engage to list one hundred instances, 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 15 inches across, and 8 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.

* * *

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, 1796-426:

"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 marvellous 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 terrestial origin.

Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that held out for exclusion of outside forces.

One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses, or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era.

We believe no more.

We accept.

Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball, continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that nothing could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled up from some other part of the earth's surface.

It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's intermediate to the commendable and the censurable.

It's virginal.

Meteorites, data of which were once damned, have been admitted, but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel --

Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.

We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:

There in the first place;

Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.

As late as November, 1902, in Nature Notes, 13-231, a member of the Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky; that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a falling, luminous object --

By progress we mean rape.

Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it.

Book of the Damned Chapter III

SO then, it is our expression that Science relates to real knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a department store, or the development of a nation: that all are assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean.

There can be no real science where there are indeterminate variables, but every variable is, in finer terms, indeterminate, or irregular, if only to have the appearance of being in Intermediateness is to express regularity unattained. The invariable, or the real and stable, would be nothing at all in Intermediateness--rather as, but in relative terms, an undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind, because that touch of relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming. Science is the attempt to awaken to realness, wherein it is attempt to find regularity and uniformity. Or the regular and uniform would be that which has nothing external to disturb it. By the universal we mean the real. Or the notion is that the underlying super-attempt, as expressed in Science, is indifferent to the subject-matter of Science: that the attempt to regularize is the vital spirit. Bugs and stars and chemical messes: that they are only quasi-real, and that of them there is nothing real to know; but that systemization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening --

Or a dreaming mind--and its centaurs and canary birds that turn into giraffes--there could be no real biology upon such subjects, but attempt, in a dreaming mind, to systematize such appearances would be movement toward awakening--if better mental co-ordination is all that we mean by the state of being awake--relatively awake.

So it is, that having attempted to systematize, by ignoring externality to the greatest possible degree, the notion of things dropping in upon this earth, from externality, is as unsettling and as unwelcome to Science as--tin horns blowing in upon a musician's relatively symmetric composition--flies alighting upon a painter's attempted harmony, and tracking colors one into another--suffragist getting up and making a political speech at a prayer meeting.

If all things are of a oneness, which is a state intermediate to unrealness and realness, and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and establishing entity for itself, and could not continue to "exist" in intermediateness, if it should succeed, any more than could the born still at the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive difference between Science and Christian Science--and the attitude of both toward the unwelcome is the same--"it does not exist."

A Lord Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy, and something not to their liking--it does not exist.

Of course not, we Intermediates say: but, also, that, in Intermediateness, neither is there absolute non-existence.

Or a Christian Scientist and a toothache--neither exists in the final sense: also neither is absolutely non-existent, and, according to our therapeutics, the one that more highly approximates to realness will win.

A secret of power --

I think it's another profundity.

Do you want power over something?

Be more nearly real than it.

We'll begin with yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth: we'll see whether our data of them have a higher approximation to realness than have the dogmas of those who deny their existence--that is, as products from somewhere external to this earth.

In mere impressionism we take our stand. We have no positive tests nor standards. Realism in art: realism in science--they pass away. In 1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are revolting and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was to accept it in its day, but Darwinism of course was never proved:

The fittest survive.

What is meant by the fittest?

Not the strongest; not the cleverest --

Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.

There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.

"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."

Darwinism:

That survivors survive.

Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the inchoate speculations that preceded it.

Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round.

Shadow of the earth on the moon?

No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is much larger than the moon. If the periphery of the shadow is curved--but the convex moon--a straight-edged object will cast a curved shadow upon a surface that is convex.

All the other so-called proofs may be taken up in the same way. It was impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not required: only that with a higher seeming of positiveness than that of his opponents, he should attempt. The thing to do, in 1492, was nevertheless to accept that beyond Europe, to the west, were other lands.

I offer for acceptance, as something concordant with the spirit of this first quarter of the 20th century, the expression that beyond this earth are--other lands--from which come things as, from America, float things to Europe.

As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees. Symons' Meteorological Magazine is especially prudish in this respect and regards as highly improper all advances made by other explainers.

Nevertheless, the Monthly Weather Review, May, 1877, reports a golden-yellow fall, of Feb. 27, 1877, at Peckloh, Germany, in which four kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There were minute things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks.

They may have been symbols. They may have been objective hieroglyphics --

Mere passing fancy--let it go --

In the Annales de Chimie, 85-288, there is a list of rains said to have contained sulphur. I have thirty or forty other notes. I'll not use one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon a fall of pollen. I said, to begin with, that our methods would be the methods of theologians and scientists, and they always begin with an appearance of liberality. I grant thirty or forty points to start with. I'm as liberal as any of them--or that my liberality won't cost me anything--the enormousness of the data that we shall have.

Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma, and the way it works out:

In the American Journal of Science, 1-42-196, we are told of a yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one "windless" night in June, in Pictou Harbour, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia and an animal odor."

Now, one of our Intermediatist principles, to start with, is that so far from positive, in the aspect of Homogeneousness, are all substances, that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, anything can be found anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of Greenland; bugs of a valley on top of Mt. Blanc; atheists at a prayer meeting; ice in India. For instance, chemical analysis can reveal that almost any dead man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll say, because there is no stomach without some iron, lead, tin, gold, arsenic in it and of it--which, of course, in a broader sense, doesn't matter much, because a certain number of persons must, as a restraining influence, be executed for murder every year; and, if detectives aren't able really to detect anything, illusion of their success is all that is necessary, and it is very honorable to give up one's life for society as a whole.

The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictou sent a sample to the Editor of the Journal. The Editor of course found pollen in it.

My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in it: that nothing could very well fall through the air, in June, near the pine forests of Nova Scotia, and escape all floating spores of pollen. But the Editor does not say that this substance "contained" pollen. He disregards "nitrogen and ammonia, and an animal odor," and says that the substance was pollen. For the sake of our thirty or forty tokens of liberality, or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really liberal, we grant that the chemist of the first examination probably wouldn't know an animal odor if he were janitor of a menagerie. As we go along, however, there can be no such sweeping ignoring of this phenomenon:

The fall of animal-matter from the sky.

I'd suggest, to start with, that we'd put ourselves in the place of deep-sea fishes:

How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above?

They wouldn't try --

Or it's easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes of a kind.

Jour. Franklin Inst., 90-11:

That, upon the 14th of February, 1870, there fell, at Genoa, Italy, according to Director Boccardo, of the Technical Institute of Genoa, and Prof. Castellani, a yellow substance. But the microscope revealed numerous globules of cobalt blue, also corpuscles of a pearly color that resembled starch. See Nature, 2-166.

Comptes Rendus, 56-972:

M. Bouis says of a substance, reddish varying to yellowish, that fell enormously and successively, or upon April 30, May 1 and May 2, in France and Spain, that it carbonized and spread the odor of charred animal matter--that it was not pollen--that in alcohol it left a residue of resinous matter.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of this matter must have fallen.

"Odor of charred animal matter."

Or an aerial battle that occurred in inter-planetary space several hundred years ago--effect of time in making diverse remains uniform in appearance --

It's all very absurd because, even though we are told of a prodigious quantity of animal matter that fell from the sky--three days--France and Spain--we're not ready yet: that's all. M. Bouis says that this substance was not pollen; the vastness of the fall makes acceptable that it was not pollen; still, the resinous residue does suggest pollen of pine trees. We shall hear a great deal of a substance with a resinous residue that has fallen from the sky: finally we shall divorce it from all suggestion of pollen.

Blackwood's Magazine, 3-338:

A yellow powder that fell at Gerace, Calabria, March 14, 1813. Some of this substance was collected by Sig. Simennini, Professor of Chemistry, at Naples. It had an earthy, insipid taste, and is described as "unctuous." When heated this matter turned brown, then black, then red. According to the Annals of Philosophy, 11-466, one of the components was a greenish-yellow substance, which, when dried, was found to be resinous.

But concomitants of this fall:

Loud noises were heard in the sky.

Stones fell from the sky.

According to Chladni, these concomitants occurred, and to me they seem--rather brutal?--or not associable with something so soft and gentle as a fall of pollen?
 

* * *

Black rains and black snows--rains as black as a deluge of ink--jet-black snowflakes.

Such a rain as that which fell in Ireland, May 14, 1849, described in the Annals of Scientific Discovery, 1850, and the Annual Register, 1849. It fell upon a district of 400 square miles, and was the color of ink, and of a fetid odor and very disagreeable taste.

The rain at Castlecommon, Ireland, April 30, 1887--"thick black rain." (Amer. Met. Jour., 4-193.)

A black rain fell in Ireland, Oct. 8 and 9, 1907. (Symons' Met. Mag., 43-2). It left a "most peculiar and disagreeable smell in the air."

The orthodox explanation of this rain occurs in Nature, March 2, 1908--cloud of soot that had come from South Wales, crossing the Irish Channel and all of Ireland.

So the black rain of Ireland, of March, 1898: ascribed in Symons' Met. Mag., 33-40, to clouds of soot from the manufacturing towns of North England and South Scotland.

Our Intermediatist principle of pseudo-logic, or our principle of Continuity is, of course, that nothing is unique, or individual: that all phenomena merge away into all other phenomena: that, for instance--suppose there should be vast super-oceanic, or inter-planetary vessels that come near this earth and discharge volumes of smoke at times. We're only supposing such a thing as that now, because, conventionally, we are beginning modestly and tentatively. But if it were so, there would necessarily be some phenomenon upon this earth, with which that phenomenon would merge. Extra-mundane smoke and smoke from cities merge, or both would manifest in black precipitations in rain.

In Continuity, it is impossible to distinguish phenomena at their merging-points, so we look for them at their extremes. Impossible to distinguish between animal and vegetable in some infusoria--but hippopotamus and violet. For all practical purposes they're distinguishable enough. No one but a Barnum or a Bailey would send one a bunch of hippopotami as a token of regard.

So away from the great manufacturing centers:

Black rain in Switzerland, Jan. 20, 1911. Switzerland is so remote, and so ill at ease is the conventional explanation here, that Nature, 85-451, says of this rain that in certain conditions of weather, snow may take on an appearance of blackness that is quite deceptive.

May be so. Or at night, if dark enough, snow may look black. This is simply denying that a black rain fell in Switzerland, Jan. 20, 1911.

Extreme remoteness from the great manufacturing centers:

La Nature, 1888, 2-406:

That Aug. 14, 1888, there fell at the Cape of Good Hope, a rain so black as to be described as a "shower of ink."

Continuity dogs us. Continuity rules us and pulls us back. We seemed to have a little hope that by the method of extremes we could get away from things that merge indistinguishably into other things. We find that every departure from one merger is entrance upon another. At the Cape of Good Hope, vast volumes of smoke from great manufacturing centers, as an explanation, can not very acceptably merge with the explanation of extra-mundane origin--but smoke from a terrestial volcano can, and that is the suggestion that is made in La Nature.

There is, in human intellection, no real standard to judge by, but our acceptance, for the present, is that the more nearly positive will prevail. By the more nearly positive we mean the more nearly Organized. Everything merges away into everything else, but proportionately to its complexity, if unified, a thing seems strong, real, and distinct: so, in aesthetics, it is recognized that diversity in unity is higher beauty, or approximation to Beauty, than is simpler unity; so the logicians feel that agreement of diverse data constitute greater convincingness, or strength, than that of mere parallel instances: so to Herbert Spencer the more highly differentiated and integrated is the more fully evolved. Our opponents hold out for mundane origin of all black rains. Our method will be the presenting of diverse phenomena in agreement with the notion of some other origin. We take up not only black rains but black rains and their accompanying phenomena.

A correspondent to Knowledge, 5-190, writes of a black rain that fell in the Clyde Valley, March 1, 1884: of another black rain that fell two days later. According to the correspondent, a black rain had fallen in the Clyde Valley, March 20, 1828: then again March 22, 1828. According to Nature, 9-43, a black rain fell at Marlsford, England, Sept. 4, 1873; more than twenty-four hours later another black rain fell in the same small town.

The black rains of Slains:

According to Rev. James Rust (Scottish Showers):

A black rain at Slains, Jan. 14, 1862--another at Carluke, 140 miles from Slains, May 1, 1862--at Slains, May 20, 1862--Slains, Oct. 28, 1863.

But after two of these showers, vast quantities of a substance described sometimes as "pumice stone," but sometimes as "slag," were washed upon the sea coast near Slains. A chemist's opinion is given that this substance was slag: that it was not a volcanic product: slag from smelting works. We now have, for black rains, a concomitant that is irreconcilable with origin from factory chimneys. Whatever it may have been the quantity of this substance was so enormous that, in Mr. Rust's opinion, to have produced so much of it would have required the united output of all the smelting works in the world. If slag it were, we accept that an artificial product has, in enormous quantities, fallen from the sky. If you don't think that such occurrences are damned by Science, read Scottish Showers and see how impossible it was for the author to have this matter taken up by the scientific world.

The first and second rains corresponded, in time, with ordinary ebullitions of Vesuvius.

The third and fourth, according to Mr. Rust, corresponded with no known volcanic activities upon this earth.

La Science Pour Tous, 11-26:

That between October, 1863, and January, 1866, four more black rains fell at Slains, Scotland.

The writer of this supplementary account tells us, with a better, or more unscrupulous, orthodoxy than Mr. Rust's, that of the eight black rains, five coincided with eruptions of Vesuvius and three with eruptions of Etna.

The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open. I should say that my own notions upon this subject will be considered irrational, but at least my gregariousness is satisfied in associating here with the preposterous--or this writer, and those who think in his rut, have to say that they can think of four discharges from one far-distant volcano, passing over a great part of Europe, precipitating nowhere else, discharging precisely over one small northern parish --

But also of three other discharges, from another far-distant volcano, showing the same precise preference, if not marksmanship, for one small parish in Scotland.

Nor would orthodoxy be any better off in thinking of exploding meteorites and their debris: preciseness and recurrence would be just as difficult to explain.

My own notion is of an island near an oceanic trade-route: it might receive debris from passing vessels seven times in four years.

Other concomitants of black rains:

In Timb's Year Book, 1851-270, there is an account of "a sort of rumbling, as of wagons, was heard for upward of an hour without ceasing," July 16, 1850, Bulwick Rectory, Northampton, England. On the 19th, a black rain fell.

In Nature, 30-6, a correspondent writes of an intense darkness at Preston, England, April 26, 1884: page 32, another correspondent writes of a black rain at Crowle, near Worcester, April 26: that a week later, or May 3, it had fallen again: another account of black rain, upon the 28th of April, near Church Stretton, so intense that the following day brooks were still dyed with it. According to four accounts by correspondents to Nature there were earthquakes in England at this time.

Or the black rain of Canada, Nov. 9, 1819. This time it is orthodoxy to attribute the black precipitate to smoke of forest fires south of the Ohio River --

Zurcher, Meteors, p.238:

That this black rain was accompanied by "shocks like those of an earthquake."

Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 2-381:

That the earthquake had occurred at the climax of intense darkness and the fall of black rain.
 

* * *

Red rains.

Orthodoxy:

Sand blown by the sirocco, from the Sahara to Europe.

Especially in the earthquake regions of Europe, there have been many falls of red substance, usually, but not always, precipitated in rain. Upon many occasions, these substances have been "absolutely identified" as sand from the Sahara. When I first took this matter up, I came across assurance after assurance, so positive to this effect, that, had I not been an Intermediatist, I'd have looked no further. Samples collected from a rain at Genoa--samples of sand forwarded from the Sahara--"absolute agreement" some writers said: same color, same particles of quartz, even the same shells of diatoms mixed in. Then the chemical analyses: not a disagreement worth mentioning.

Our intermediatist means of expression will be that, with proper exclusions, after the scientific or theological method, anything can be identified with anything else, if all things are only different expressions of an underlying oneness.

To many minds there's a rest and there's satisfaction in that expression "absolutely identified." Absoluteness, or the illusion of it--the universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds, that's assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated, little world, free from contact with cosmic wickednesses, safe from stellar guile, undisturbed by inter-planetary prowlings and invasions. The only trouble is that a chemist's analysis, which seems so final and authoritative to some minds, is no more nearly absolute than is identification by a child or description by an imbecile --

I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is higher --

But that it's based upon delusion, because there is no definiteness, no homogeneity, no stability, only different stages somewhere between them and indefiniteness, heterogeneity, and instability. There are no chemical elements. It seems acceptable that Ramsay and others have settled that. The chemical elements are only another disappointment in the quest of the positive, as the definite, the homogeneous, and the stable. If there were real elements, there could be a real science of chemistry.

Upon Nov. 12 and 13, 1902, occurred the greatest fall of matter in the history of Australia. Upon the 14th of November, it "rained mud," in Tasmania. It was of course attributed to Australian whirlwinds, but, according to the Monthly Weather Review, 32-365, there was a haze all the way to the Philippines, also as far as Hong Kong. It may be that this phenomenon had no especial relation with the even more tremendous fall of matter that occurred in Europe, February, 1903.

For several days, the south of England was a dumping ground--from somewhere.

If you'd like to have a chemist's opinion, even though it's only a chemist's opinion, see the report of the meeting of the Chemical Society of London, April 2, 1903. Mr. E.G. Clayton read a paper upon some of the substance that had fallen from the sky, collected by him. The Sahara explanation applies mostly to falls that occur in southern Europe. Farther away, the conventionalists are a little uneasy: for instance, the editor of the Monthly Weather Review, 29-121, says of a red rain that fell near the coast of Newfoundland, early in 1890: "It would be very remarkable if this was Sahara dust." Mr. Clayton said that the matter examined by him was "merely wind-borne dust from the roads and lanes of Wessex." This opinion is typical of all scientific opinion--or theological opinion--or feminine opinion--all very well except for what it disregards. The most charitable thing I can think of--because I think it gives us a broader tone to relieve our malices with occasional charities--is that Mr. Clayton had not heard of the astonishing extent of this fall--had covered the Canary Islands, on the 19th, for instance. I think, myself, that in 1903, we passed through the remains of a powdered world--left over from an ancient inter-planetary dispute, brooding in space like a red resentment ever since. Or, like every other opinion, the notion of dust from Wessex turns into a provincial thing when we look it over.

To think is to conceive incompletely, because all thought relates only to the local. We metaphysicians, of course, like to have the notion that we think of the unthinkable.

As to opinions, or pronouncements, I should say, because they always have such an authoritative air, of other chemists, there is an analysis in Nature, 68-54, giving water and organic matter at 9.08 per cent. It's that carrying out of fractions that's so convincing. The substance is identified as sand from the Sahara.

The vastness of this fall. In Nature, 68-65, we are told that it had occurred in Ireland, too. The Sahara, of course--because, prior to Feb. 19, there had been dust storms in the Sahara--disregarding that in that great region there's always, in some part of it, a dust storm. However, just at present, it does look reasonable that dust had come from Africa, via the Canaries.

The great difficulty that authoritativeness has to contend with is some other authoritativeness. When an infallibility clashes with a pontification --

They explain.

Nature, March 5, 1903:

Another analysis--36 per cent organic matter.

Such disagreements don't look very well, so, in Nature, 68-109, one of the differing chemists explains. He says that his analysis was of muddy rain, and the other was of sediment of rain --

We're quite ready to accept excuses from the most high, though I do wonder whether we're quite so damned as we were, if we find ourselves in a gracious and tolerant mood toward the powers that condemn--but the tax that now comes upon our good manners and unwillingness to be too severe --

Nature, 68-223:

Another chemist. He says it was 23.49 per cent water and organic matter.

He "identifies" this matter as sand from an African desert--but after deducting organic matter --

But you and I could be "identified" as sand from an African desert, after deducting all there is to us except sand --

Why we can not accept that this fall was of sand from the Sahara, omitting the obvious objection that in most parts the Sahara is not red at all, but is usually described as "dazzling white" --

The enormousness of it: that a whirlwind might have carried it, but that, in that case it would be no supposititious, or doubtfully identified whirlwind, but the greatest atmospheric cataclysm in the history of this earth:

Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 30-56:

That, up to the 27th of February, this fall had continued in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Austria; that in some instances it was not sand, or that almost all the matter was organic: that a vessel had reported the fall as occurring in the Atlantic Ocean, midway between Southampton and the Barbados. The calculation is given that, in England alone, 10,000,000 tons of matter had fallen. It had fallen in Switzerland, (Symons' Met. Mag., March, 1903). It had fallen in Russia (Bull. Com. Geolog., 22-48). Not only had a vast quantity of matter fallen several months before, in Australia, but it was at this time falling in Australia (Victorian Naturalist, June, 1903)--enormously--red mud--fifty tons per square mile.

The Wessex explanation --

Or that every explanation is a Wessex explanation: by that I mean an attempt to interpret the enormous in terms of the minute--but that nothing can be finally explained, because by Truth we mean the Universal; and that even if we could think as wide as Universality, that would not be requital to the cosmic quest--which is not for Truth, but for the local that is true--not to universalize the local, but to localize the universal--or to give to a cosmic cloud absolute interpretation in terms of the little dusty roads and lanes of Wessex. I can not conceive that this can be done: I think of high approximation.

Our Intermediatist concept is that, because of the continuity of all "things," which are not separate, positive, or real things, all pseudo-things partake of the underlying, or are only different expressions, degrees, or aspects of the underlying: so then that a sample from somewhere in anything must correspond with a sample from somewhere in anything else.

That, by due care in selection, and disregard for everything else, or the scientific and theological method, the substance that fell, February, 1903, could be identified with anything, or with some part or aspect of anything that could be conceived of --

With sand from the Sahara, sand from a barrel of sugar, or dust of your great, great grandfather.

Different samples are described and listed in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 30-57--or we'll see whether my notion that a chemist could have identified some one of these samples as from anywhere conceivable, is extreme or not:

"Similar to brick dust," in one place; "buff or light brown," in another place; "chocolate-colored and silky to the touch and slightly iridescent"; "gray"; "red-rust color"; "reddish raindrops and gray sand"; "dirty gray"; "quite red"; "yellow-brown, with a tinge of pink"; "deep yellow-clay color."

In Nature, it is described as of a peculiar yellowish cast in one place, reddish somewhere else, and salmon-colored in another place.

Or there could be real science if there were really anything to be scientific about.

Or the science of chemistry is like a science of sociology, prejudiced in advance, because only to see is to see with a prejudice, setting out to "prove" that all inhabitants of New York came from Africa.

Very easy matter. Samples from one part of town. Disregard for all the rest.

There is no science but Wessex-science.

According to our acceptance, there should be no other, but that approximation should be higher: that metaphysics is super-evil: that the scientific spirit is of the cosmic quest.

Our notion is that, in a real existence, such a quasi-system of fables as the science of chemistry could not deceive for a moment: but that in an "existence" endeavoring to become real, it represents that endeavor, and will continue to impose its pseudo-positiveness until it be driven out by a higher approximation to realness;

That the science of chemistry is as impositive as fortune-telling --

Or no --

That, though it represents a higher approximation to realness than does alchemy, for instance, and so drove out alchemy, it is still somewhere between myth and positiveness.

The attempt at realness, or to state a real and unmodified fact here, is the statement:

All red rains are colored sands from the Sahara desert.

My own impositivist acceptances are:

That some red rains are colored by sands from the Sahara desert;

Some by sands from other terrestrial sources;

Some by sands from other worlds, or from their deserts--also from aerial regions too indefinite or amorphous to be thought of as "worlds" or planets --

That no supposititious whirlwind can account for the hundreds of millions of tons of matter that fell upon Australia, Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean and Europe in 1902 and 1903--that a whirlwind that could do that would not be supposititious.

But now we shall cast off some of our wessicality by accepting that there have been falls of red substance other than sand.

We regard every science as an expression of the attempt to be real. But to be real is to localize the universal--or to make some one thing as wide as all things--successful accomplishment of which I cannot conceive of. The prime resistance to this endeavor is the refusal of the rest of the universe to be damned, excluded, disregarded, to receive Christian Science treatment, by something else so attempting. Although all phenomena are striving for the Absolute--or have surrendered to and have incorporated themselves in higher attempts, simply to be phenomenal, or to have seeming in Intermediateness is to express relations.

A river.

It is water expressing the gravitational relation of different levels.

The water of the river.

Expression of chemic relations of hydrogen and oxygen--which are not final.

A city.

Manifestation of commercial and social relations.

How could a mountain be without base in a greater body?

Storekeeper live without customers?

The prime resistance to the positivist attempt by Science is its relations with other phenomena, or that it only expresses those relations in the first place. Or that a Science can have seeming, or survive in Intermediateness, as something pure, isolated, positively different, no more than could a river or a city or a mountain or a store.

This Intermediateness-wide attempt by parts to be wholes--which cannot be realized in our quasi-state, if we accept that in it the co-existence of two or more wholes or universals is impossible--high approximation to which, however, may be thinkable --

Scientists and their dream of "pure science."

Artists and their dream of "art for art's sake."

It is our notion that if they could almost realize, that would be almost realness: that they would instantly be translated into real existence. Such thinkers are good positivists, but they are evil in an economic and sociologic sense, if, in that sense, nothing has justification for being, unless it serve, or function for, or express the relations of, some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by prostitution I mean usefulness.

There have been red rains that, in the middle ages, were called "rains of blood." Such rains terrified many persons, and were so unsettling to large populations, that Science, in its sociologic relations, has sought, by Mrs. Eddy's method, to remove an evil --

That "rains of blood" do not exist;

That rains so called are only of water colored by sand from the Sahara desert.

My own acceptance is that such assurances, whether fictitious or not, whether the Sahara is a "dazzling white" desert or not, have wrought such good effects, in a sociologic sense, even though prostitutional in the positivist sense, they were well justified;

But that we've gone on: that this is the twentieth century; that most of us have grown up so that such soporifics of the past are no longer necessary:

That if gushes of blood should fall from the sky upon New York City, business would go on as usual.

We began with rains that we accepted ourselves were, most likely, only of sand. In my own still immature hereticalness--and by heresy, or progress, I mean, very largely, a return, though with many modifications, to the superstitions of the past, I think I feel considerable aloofness to the idea of rains of blood. Just at present, it is my conservative, or timid purpose, to express only that there have been red rains that very strongly suggest blood or finely divided animal matter --

Debris from inter-planetary disasters.

Aerial battles.

Food-supplies from cargoes of super-vessels, wrecked in inter-planetary traffic.

There was a red rain in the Mediterranean region, March 6, 1888. Twelve days later, it fell again. Whatever this substance may have been, when burned, the odor of animal matter from it was strong and persistent. (L'Astronomie, 1888-205).

But--infinite heterogeneity--or debris from many different kinds of aerial cargoes--there have been red rains that have been colored by neither sand nor animal matter.

Annals of Philosophy, 16-226:

That, Nov. 2, 1819--week before the black rain and earthquake of Canada--there fell, at Blankenberge, Holland, a red rain. As to sand, two chemists of Bruges concentrated 144 ounces of the rain to 4 ounces--"no precipitate fell." But the color was so marked that had there been sand, it would have been deposited, if the substance had been diluted instead of concentrated. Experiments were made, and various reagents did cast precipitates, but other than sand. The chemists concluded that the rain-water contained muriate of cobalt--which is not very enlightening: that could be said of many substances carried in vessels upon the Atlantic Ocean. Whatever it may have been, in the Annales de Chimie, 2-12-432, its color is said to have been red-violet. For various chemic reactions, see Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 9-202, and Edin. Phil. Jour., 2-381.

Something that fell with dust said to have been meteoric, March 9, 10, 11, 1872: described in the Chemical News, 25-300, as a "peculiar substance," consisted of red iron ochre, carbonate of lime, and organic matter.

Orange-red hail, March 14, 1873, in Tuscany. (Notes and Queries, 9-5-16.)

Rain of lavender-colored substance, at Oudon, France, Dec. 19, 1903. (Bull. Soc. Met. de France, 1904-124.)

La Nature, 1885-2-351:

That, according to Prof. Schwedoff, there fell, in Russia, June 14, 1880, red hailstones, also blue hailstones, also gray hailstones.

Nature, 34-123:

A correspondent writes that he had been told by a resident of a small town in Venezuela, that there, April 17, 1886, had fallen hailstones, some red, some blue, some whitish: informant said to have been one unlikely to have heard of the Russian phenomenon; described as an "honest, plain countryman."

Nature, July 5, 1877, quotes a Roman correspondent to the London Times who sent a translation from an Italian newspaper: that a red rain had fallen in Italy, June 23, 1877, containing "microscopically small particles of sand."

Or, according to our acceptance, any other story would have been an evil thing, in the sociologic sense, in Italy, in 1877. But the English correspondent, from a land where terrifying red rains are uncommon, does not feel this necessity. He writes: "I am by no means satisfied that the rain was of sand and water." His observations are that drops of this rain left stains "such as sandy water could not leave." He notes that when the water evaporated, no sand was left behind.

L'Année Scientifique, 1888-75:

That, Dec. 13, 1887, there fell, in Cochin China, a substance like blood, somewhat coagulated.

Annales de Chimie, 85-266:

That a thick, viscous, red matter fell at Ulm, in 1812.

We now have a datum with a factor that has been foreshadowed; which will recur and recur and recur throughout this book. It is a factor that makes for speculation so revolutionary that it will have to be re-enforced many times before we can take it into full acceptance.

Year Book of Facts, 1861-273:

Quotation from a letter from Prof. Campini to Prof. Matteucci:

That, upon Dec. 28, 1860, at about 7 a.m., in the northwestern part of Siena, a reddish rain feel copiously for two hours.

A second red shower fell at 11 o'clock.

Three days later, the red rain fell again.

The next day another red rain fell.

Still more extraordinarily:

Each fall occurred in "exactly the same quarter of the town."

Book of the Damned Chapter IV

IT is in the records of the French Academy that, upon March 17, 1669, in the town of Chatillon-sur-Seine, fell a reddish substance that was "thick, viscous, and putrid."

American Journal of Science, 1-41-404:

Story of a highly unpleasant substance that had fallen from the sky, in Wilson County, Tennessee. We read that Dr. Troost visited the place and investigated. Later we're going to investigate some investigations--but never mind that now. Dr. Troost reported that the substance was clear blood and portions of flesh scattered upon tobacco fields. He argued that a whirlwind might have taken an animal up from one place, mauled it around, and have precipitated its remains somewhere else.

But, in volume 44, page 216, of the Journal, there is an apology. The whole matter is, upon newspaper authority, said to have been a hoax by negroes, who had pretended to have seen the shower, for the sake of practicing upon the credulity of their masters: that they had scattered the decaying flesh of a dead hog over the tobacco fields.

If we don't accept this datum, at least we see the sociologically necessary determination to have all falls accredited to earthly origins--even when they're falls that don't fall.

Annual Register, 1821-687:

That, upon the 13th of August, 1819, something had fallen from the sky at Amherst, Mass. It had been examined and described by Prof. Graves, formerly lecturer at Dartmouth College. It was an object that had upon it a nap, similar to that of milled cloth. Upon removing this nap, a buff-colored, pulpy substance was found. It had an offensive odor, and, upon exposure to air, turned to a vivid red. This thing was said to have fallen with a brilliant light.

Also see the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 5-295. In the Annales de Chimie, 1821-67, M. Arago accepts the datum, and gives four instances of similar objects or substances said to have fallen out of the sky, two of which we shall have with our data of gelatinous, or viscous matter, and two of which I omit, because it seems to me that the dates given are too far back.

In the American Journal of Science, 1-2-335, is Prof. Graves' account, communicated by Professor Dewey.

That, upon the evening of August 13, 1819, a light was seen in Amherst--a falling object--sound as if of an explosion.

In the home of Prof. Dewey, this light was reflected upon a wall of a room in which were several members of Prof. Dewey's family.

The next morning, in Prof. Dewey's front yard, in what is said to have been the only position from which the light that had been seen in the room, the night before, could have been reflected, was found a substance "unlike anything before observed by anyone who saw it." It was a bowl-shaped object, about 8 inches in diameter, and one inch thick. Bright buff-colored, and having upon it a "fine nap." Upon removing this covering, a buff-colored, pulpy substance of the consistency of soft-soap, was found--"of an offensive, suffocating smell."

A few minutes of exposure to the air changed the buff color to "a livid color resembling venous blood." It absorbed moisture quickly from the air and liquified. For some of the chemic reactions, see the Journal.

There's another lost quasi-soul of a datum that seems to me to belong here:

London Times, April 19, 1836:

Fall of fish that had occurred in the neighborhood of Allahabad, India. It is said that the fish were of the chalwa species, about a span in length and a seer in weight--you know. They were dead and dry.

Or they had been such a long time out of water that we can't accept that they had been scooped out of a pond, by a whirlwind--even though they were so definitely identified as of a known local species --

Or they were not fish at all.

I incline, myself, to the acceptance that they were not fish, but slender, fish-shaped objects of the same substance as that which fell at Amherst--it is said that, whatever they were, they could not be eaten: that "in the pan, they turned into blood."

For details of this story see the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1834-307. May 16 or 17, 1834, is the date given in the Journal.

In the American Journal of Science, 1-25-362, occurs the inevitable damnation of the Amherst object.

Prof. Edward Hitchcock went to live in Amherst. He says that years later, another object, like the one said to have fallen in 1819, had been found at "nearly the same place." Prof. Hitchcock was invited by Prof. Graves to examine it. Exactly like the first one. Corresponded in size and color and consistency. The chemic reactions were the same.

Prof. Hitchcock recognized it in a moment.

It was a gelatinous fungus.

He did not satisfy himself as to just the exact species it belonged to, but he predicted that similar fungi might spring up within twenty-four hours--

But, before evening, two others sprang up.

Or we've arrived at one of the oldest of the exclusionists' conventions--or nostoc. We shall have many data of gelatinous substance said to have fallen from the sky: almost always the exclusionists argue that it was only nostoc, an Alga, or, in some respects, a fungous growth. The rival convention is "spawn of frogs or of fishes." These two conventions have made a strong combination. In instances where testimony was not convincing that gelatinous matter had been seen to fall, it was said that the gelatinous substance was nostoc, and had been on the ground in the first place: when the testimony was too good that it had fallen, it was said to be spawn that had been carried from one place to another in a whirlwind.

Now, I can't say that nostock is always greenish, any more than I can say that blackbirds are always black, having seen a white one: we shall quote a scientist who knew of flesh-colored nostoc, when so to know was convenient. When we come to reported falls of gelatinous substances, I'd like it to be noticed how often they are described as whitish or grayish. In looking up the subject, myself, I have read only of greenish nostoc. Said to be greenish, in Webster's Dictionary--said to be "blue-green" in the New International Encyclopedia--"from bright green to olive-green" (Science Gossip, 10-114); "green" (Science Gossip, 7-260); "greenish" (Notes and Queries, 1-11-219) It would seem acceptable that, if many reports of white birds should occur, the birds are not blackbirds, even though there have been white blackbirds. Or that, if often reported, grayish or whitish gelatinous substance is not nostoc, and is not spawn if occurring in times unseasonable for spawn.

"The Kentucky Phenomenon."

So it was called, in its day, and now we have an occurrence that attracted a great deal of attention in its own time. Usually these things of the accursed have been hushed up or disregarded--suppressed like the seven black rains of Slains--but, upon March 3, 1876, something occurred, in Bath County, Kentucky, that brought many newspaper correspondents to the scene.

The substance that looked like beef that fell from the sky.

Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky--"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky. It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three, or four inches square. The flake-formation is interesting: later we shall think of it as signifying pressure--somewhere. It was a thick shower, on the ground, on trees, on fences, but it was narrowly localized: or upon a strip of land about 100 yards long and about 50 yards wide. For the first account, see the Scientific American, 34-197, and the New York Times, March 10, 1876.

Then the exclusionists.

Something that looked like beef: one flake of it the size of a square envelope.

If we think of how hard the exclusionists have fought to reject the coming of ordinary-looking dust from this earth's externality, we can sympathize with them in this sensational instance, perhaps. Newspaper correspondents wrote broadcast and witnesses were quoted, and this time there is no mention of a hoax, and, except by one scientist, there is no denial that the fall did take place.

It seems to me that the exclusionists are still more emphatically conservators. It is not so much that they are inimical to all data of externally derived substances that fall upon this earth, as that they are inimical to all data discordant with a system that does not include such phenomena--

Or the spirit or hope or ambition of the cosmos, which we call attempted positivism: not to find out the new; not to add to what is called knowledge, but to systematize.

Scientific American Supplement, 2-426:

That the substance reported from Kentucky had been examined by Leopold Brandeis.

"At last we have a proper explanation of this much talked of phenomenon."

"It has been comparatively easy to identify the substance and to fix its status. The Kentucky `wonder' is no more or less than nostoc."

Or that it had not fallen; that it had been upon the ground in the first place, and had swollen in rain, and, attracting attention by greatly increased volume, had been supposed by unscientific observers to have fallen in rain--

What rain, I don't know.

Also it is spoken of as "dried" several times. That's one of the most important of the details.

But the relief of outraged propriety, expressed in the Supplement, is amusing to some of us, who, I fear, may be a little improper at times. Very spirit of the Salvation Army, when some third-rate scientist comes out with an explanation of the vermiform appendix or the os cocyx that would have been acceptable to Moses. To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that Mr. Brandeis had identified the substance as "flesh-colored" nostoc.

Prof. Lawrence Smith, of Kentucky, one of the most resolute of the exclusionists:

New York Times, March 12, 1876:

That the substance had been examined and analyzed by Prof. Smith, according to whom, it gave every indication of being the "dried" spawn of some reptile, "doubtless of the frog"--or up from one place and down in another. As to "dried," that may refer to the condition when Prof. Smith received it.

In the Scientific American Supplement, 2-473, Dr. A. Mead Edwards, President of the Newark Scientific Association, writes that, when he saw Mr. Brandeis' communication, his feeling was of conviction that propriety had been re-established, or that the problem had been solved, as he expresses it: knowing Mr. Brandeis well, he had called upon that upholder of respectability, to see the substance that had been identified as nostoc. But he had also called upon Dr. Hamilton, who had a specimen, and Dr. Hamilton had declared it to be lung-tissue. Dr. Edwards writes of the substance that had so completely, or beautifully--if beauty is completeness--been identified as nostoc--"It turned out to be lung tissue also," He wrote to other persons who had specimens, and identified other specimens as masses of cartilage or muscular fibres. "As to whence it came, I have no theory." Nevertheless he endorses the local explanation--and a bizarre thing it is:

A flock of gorged, heavy-weighted buzzards, but far up and invisible in the clear sky--

They had disgorged.

Prof. Fassig lists the substance, in his "Bibliography," as fish spawn. McAtee (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1918), lists it as a jelly-like material, supposed to have been the "dried" spawn either of fishes or of some batrachian.

Or this is why, against the seemingly insuperable odds against all things new, there can be what is called progress--

That nothing is positive, in the aspects of homogeneity and unity:

If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only unreal combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity. Every resistance is itself divided into parts resisting one another. The simplest strategy seems to be--never bother to fight a thing: set its own parts fighting one another.

We are merging away from carnal to gelatinous substance, and here there is an abundance of instances or reports of instances. These data are so improper they're obscene to the science of to-day, but we shall see that science, before it became so rigorous, was not so prudish. Chladni was not, and Greg was not.

I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often fallen from the sky--

Or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous?

That meteors tear through and detach fragments?

That fragments are brought down by storms?

That the twinkling of stars is penetration of light through something that quivers?

I think, myself, that it would be absurd to say that the whole sky is gelatinous: it seems more acceptable that only certain areas are.

Humboldt, (Cosmos, 1-119), says that all our data in this respect must be "classed amongst the mythical fables of mythology." He is very sure, but just a little redundant.

We shall be opposed by the standard resistances:

There in the first place;

Up from one place, in a whirlwind, and down in another.

We shall not bother to be very convincing one way or another, because of the over-shadowing of the datum with which we shall end up. It will mean that something had been in a stationary position for several days over a small part of a small town in England: this is the revolutionary thing that we have alluded to before; whether the substance were nostoc, or spawn, or some kind of a larval nexus, doesn't matter so much. If it stood in the sky for several days, we rank with Moses as a chronicler of improprieties--or was that story, or datum, we mean, told by Moses? Then we shall have so many records of gelatinous substance said to have fallen with meteorites, that, between the two phenomena, some of us will have [47/48] to accept connection--or that there are at least vast gelatinous areas aloft, and that meteorites tear through, carrying down some of the substance.

Comptes Rendus, 3-554:

That, in 1836, M. Vallot, member of the French Academy, placed before the Academy some fragments of a gelatinous substance, said to have fallen from the sky, and asked that they be analyzed. There is no further allusion to this subject.

Comptes Rendus, 23-542:

That, in Wilna, Lithuania, April 4, 1846, in a rainstorm, fell nut-sized masses of a substance that is described as both resinous and gelatinous. It was odorless until burned: then it spread a very pronounced sweetish odor. It is described as like gelatine, but much firmer: but, having been in water 24 hours, it swelled out, and looked altogether gelatinous--

It was grayish.

We are told that, in 1841 and 1846, a similar substance had fallen in Asia Minor.

In Notes and Queries, 8-6-190, it is said that, early in August, 1894, thousands of jelly fish, about the size of a shilling, had fallen at Bath, England. I think it is not acceptable that they were jelly fish: but it does look as if this time frog spawn did fall from the sky, and may have been translated by a whirlwind--because, about the same time, small frogs fell at Wigan, England.

Nature, 87-10:

That, June 24, 1911, at Eton, Bucks, England, the ground was found covered with masses of jelly, the size of peas, after a heavy rainfall. We are not told of nostoc, this time: it is said that the object contained numerous eggs of "some species of Chironomus, from which larvae soon emerged."

I incline, then, to think that the objects that fell at Bath were neither jelly fish nor masses of frog spawn, but something of a larval kind--

This is what had occurred at Bath, England, 23 years before.

London Times, April 24, 1871:

That, upon the 22nd of April, 1871, a storm of glutinous drops neither jelly fish nor masses of frog spawn, but something of a railroad station at Bath. "Many of them soon developed into a worm-like chrysalis, about an inch in length." The account of this occurrence in the Zoologist, 2-6-2686, is more like the Eton-datum: of [48/49] minute forms, said to have been infusoria; not forms about an inch in length.

Trans. Ent. Soc. of London, 1871-proc. xxii:

That the phenomenon has been investigated by the Rev. L. Jenyns, of Bath. His description is of minute worms in filmy envelopes. He tries to account for their segregation. The mystery of it is: What could have brought so many of them together? Many other falls we shall record of, and in most of them segregation is the great mystery. A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force. Segregation of things that have fallen from the sky has been avoided as most deep-dyed of the damned. Mr. Jenyns conceives of a large pool, in which were many of these spherical masses: of the pool drying up and concentrating all in a small area; of a whirlwind then scooping all up together--

But several days before, more of these objects fell in the place.

That such marksmanship is not attributable to whirlwinds seems to me to be what we think we mean by common sense:

It may not look like common sense to say that these things had been stationary over the town of Bath, several days--

The seven black rains of Slains;

The four red rains of Siena.

An interesting sidelight on the mechanics of orthodoxy is that Mr. Jenyns dutifully records the second fall, but ignores it in his explanation.

R.P. Greg, one of the most notable cataloguers of meteoritic phenomena, records (Phil. Mag.: 4-8-463) falls of viscid substance in the years 1652, 1686, 1718, 1796, 1811, 1819, 1844. He gives earlier dates, but I practice exclusions, myself. In the Report of the British Association, 1860-63, Greg records a meteor that seemed to pass near the ground, between Barsdorf and Freiburg, Germany: the next day a jelly-like mass was found in the snow--

Unseasonableness for either spawn or nostoc.

Greg's comment in this instance is: "curious, if true." But he records without modification the fall of a meteorite at Gotha, Germany, Sept. 6, 1835, "leaving a jelly-like mass on the ground." We are told that this substance fell only three feet away from an observer. In the Report of the British Association, 1855-94, according to a letter from Greg to Prof. Baden-Powell, at night, Oct. 8, 1844, near Coblentz, a German, who was known to Greg, and another person, saw a luminous body fall close to them. They returned next morning and found a gelatinous mass of grayish color.

According to Chladni's account (Annals of Philosophy, n.s., 12-94) a viscous mass fell with a luminous meteorite between Siena and Rome, May, 1652; viscous matter found after the fall of a fire ball, in Lusatia, March, 1796; fall of a gelatinous substance, after the explosion of a meteorite, near Heidelberg, July, 1811. In the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 1-234, the substance that fell at Lusatia is said to have been the "color and odor of dried, brown varnish." In the Amer. Jour. Sci., 1-26-133, it is said that gelatinous matter fell with a globe of fire, upon the island of Lethy, India, 1718.

In the Amer. Jour. Sci., 1-25-396, in many observations upon the meteors of November, 1833, are reports of falls of gelatinous substance:

That, according to newspaper reports, "lumps of jelly" were found on the ground at Rahway, N. J. The substance was whitish, or resembled the coagulated white of an egg;

That Mr. H. H. Garland, of Nelson County, Virginia, had found a jelly-like substance of about the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece;

That, according to a communication from A.C. Twining to Prof. Olmstead, a woman at West Point, N. Y., had seen a mass the size of a tea cup. It looked like boiled starch;

That, according to a newspaper, of Newark, N. J., a mass of gelatinous substance, like soft soap, had been found. "It possessed little elasticity, and, on the application of heat, evaporated as readily as water."

It seems incredible that a scientist would have such hardihood, or infidelity, as to accept that these things had fallen from the sky: nevertheless, Prof. Olmstead, who collected these lost souls, says:

"The fact that the supposed deposits were so uniformly described as gelatinous substance forms a presumption in favor of the supposition that they had the origin ascribed to them."

In contemporaneous scientific publications considerable attention was given to Prof. Olmstead's series of papers upon this subject of the November meteors. You will not find one mention of the part that treats of gelatinous matter.

Book of the Damned Chapter V

I SHALL attempt not much of correlation of dates. A mathematic-minded positivist, with his delusion that in an intermediate state twice two are four, whereas, if we accept Continuity, we can not accept that these are anywhere two things to start with, would search our data for periodicities. It is so obvious to me that the mathematic, or the regular, is the attribute of the Universal, that I have not much inclination to look for it in the local. Still, in this solar system, "as a whole," there is considerable approximation to regularity; or the mathematic is so nearly localized that eclipses, for instance, can, with rather high approximation, be foretold, though I have notes that would deflate a little the astronomers' vainglory in this respect--or would if that were possible. An astronomer is poorly paid, uncheered by crowds, considerably isolated: he lives upon his own inflations: deflate a bear and it couldn't hibernate. This solar system is like every other phenomenon that can be regarded "as a whole"--or the affairs of a ward are interfered with by the affairs of the city of which it is a part; city by county; county by state; state by nation; nation by other nations; all nations by climatic conditions; climatic conditions by solar circumstances; sun by general planetary circumstances; solar system "as a whole" by other solar systems--so the hopelessness of finding the phenomena of entirety in the ward of a city. But positivists are those who try to find the unrelated in the ward of a city. In our acceptance this is the spirit of cosmic religion. Objectively the state is not realizable in the ward of a city. But, if a positivist could bring himself to absolute belief that he had found it, that would be a subjective realization of that which is unrealizable objectively. Of course we do not draw a positive line between the objective and subjective--or that all phenomena called things or persons are subjective within one all-inclusive nexus, and that thoughts within those that are commonly called "persons" are sub-subjective. It is rather as if Intermediateness strove for Regularity in this solar system and failed: then generated the mentality of astronomers, and, in that secondary expression, strove for conviction that failure had been success.

I have tabulated all the data of this book, and a great deal besides--card system--and several proximities, thus emphasized, have been revelations to me: nevertheless, it is only the method of theologians and scientists--worst of all, of statisticians.

For instance, by the statistic method, I could "prove" that a black rain had fallen "regularly" every seven months, somewhere upon this earth. To do this, I'd have to include red rains and yellow rains, but, conventionally, I'd pick out the black particles in red substances and in yellow substances, and disregard the rest. Then, too, if here and there, a black rain should be a week early or a month late--that would be "acceleration" or "retardation." This is supposed to be legitimate in working out the periodicities of comets. If black rains, or red or yellow rains with black particles in them, should not appear at all near some dates--we have not read Darwin in vain--"the records are not complete." As to other, interfering black rains, they'd be either gray or brown, or for them we'd find other periodicities.

Still, I have had to notice the year 1819, for instance. I shall not note them all in this book, but I have records of 31 extraordinary events in 1883. Someone should write a book upon the phenomena of this one year--that is, if books should be written. 1849 is notable for extraordinary falls, so far apart that a local explanation seems inadequate--not only the black rain of Ireland, May, 1849,; but a red rain in Sicily and a red rain in Wales. Also, it is said (Timb's Year Book, 1850-241) that, upon April 18 or 20, 1849, shepherds near Mt. Ararat, found a substance that was not indigenous, upon areas measuring 5 to 10 miles in circumference. Presumably it had fallen there.

We have already gone into the subject of Science and its attempted positiveness, and its resistances in that it must have relations of service. It is very easy to see that most of the theoretic science of the 19th century was only a relation of reaction against theologic dogma, and has no more to do with Truth than has a wave that bounds back from a shore. Or, if a shop girl, or you or I, should pull out a piece of chewing gum about a yard long, that would be quite as scientific a performance as was the stretching of this earth's age several hundred million of years.

All "things" are not things, but only relations, or expressions of relations: but all relations are striving to be unrelated, or have surrendered to, and subordinated to, higher attempts. So there is a positivist aspect to this reaction that is itself only a relation, and that is the attempt to assimilate all phenomena under the materialist explanation, or to formulate a final, all-inclusive system, upon the materialist basis. If this attempt could be realized, that would be the attaining of realness; but this attempt can be made only by disregarding psychic phenomena, for instance--or, if science shall eventually give in to the psychic, it would be no more legitimate to explain the immaterial in terms of the material, than to explain the material in terms of the immaterial. Our own acceptance is that material and immaterial are of a oneness, merging, for instance, in a thought that is continuous with a physical action: that oneness cannot be explained, because the process of explaining is the interpreting of something in terms of something else. All explanation is assimilation of something in terms of something else that has been taken as a basis: but, in Continuity, there is nothing that is any more basic than anything else--unless we think that delusion built upon delusion is less real than its pseudo-foundation.

In 1829 (Timb's Year Book, 1848-235) in Persia, fell a substance that the people said they had never seen before. As to what it was, they had not a notion, but they saw that the sheep ate it. They ground it into flour and made bread, said to have been passable enough, though insipid.

That was a chance that science did not neglect. Manna was placed upon a reasonable basis, or was assimilated and reconciled with the system that had ousted the older--and less nearly real--system. It was said that, likely enough, manna had fallen in ancient times--because it was still falling--but that there was no tutelary influence behind it--that it was a lichen from the steppes of Asia Minor--"up from one place in a whirlwind and down in another place." In the American Almanac, 1833-71, it is said that this substance--"unknown to the inhabitants of the region"--was "immediately recognized" by scientists who examined it: and that "the chemical analysis also identified it as a lichen."

This was back in the days when Chemical Analysis was a god. Since then his devotees have been shocked and disillusioned. Just how a chemical analysis could so botanize, I don't know--but it was Chemical Analysis who spoke, and spoke dogmatically. It seems to me that the ignorance of inhabitants, contrasting with the local knowledge of foreign scientists, is overdone: if there's anything good to eat, within any distance conveniently covered by a whirlwind--inhabitants know it. I have data of other falls, in Persia and Asiatic Turkey, of edible substances. They are all dogmatically [53/54] said to be "manna"; and "manna" is dogmatically said to be a species of lichens from the steppes of Asia Minor. The position I take is that this explanation was evolved in ignorance of the fall of vegetable substances, or edible substances, in other parts of the world: that it is the familiar attempt to explain the general in terms of the local; that, if we shall have data of falls of vegetable substance, in, say, Canada, or India, they were not of lichens from the steppes of Asia Minor; that, though all falls in Asiatic Turkey and Persia are sweepingly and conveniently called showers of "manna," they have not been even all of the same substance. In one instance the particles are said to have been "seeds." Though, in Comptes Rendus, the substance in 1841 and 1846, is said to have been gelatinous, in the Bull. Sci. Nat. de Neuchatel, it is said to have been of something, in lumps the size of a filbert, that had been ground into flour; that of this flour had been made bread, very attractive-looking, but flavorless.

The great difficulty is to explain segregation in these showers --

But deep-sea fishes and occasional falls down to them, of edible substances; bags of grain, barrels of sugar; things that had not been whirled up from one part of the ocean-bottom, in storms or submarine disturbances, and dropped somewhere else --

I suppose one thinks--but grain in bags never has fallen --

Object of Amherst--its covering like "milled cloth" --

Or barrels of corn lost from a vessel would not sink--but a host of them clashing together, after a wreck--they burst open; the corn sinks, or does when saturated; the barrel staves float longer --

If there be not an overhead traffic in commodities similar to our own commodities carried over this earth's oceans--I'm not the deep-sea fish I think I am.

I have no data other than the mere suggestion of the Amherst object of bags or barrels, but my notion is that bags and barrels from a wreck on one of this earth's oceans, would, by the time they reached the bottom, no longer be recognizable as bags or barrels; that, if we can have data of the fall of fibrous material that may have been cloth or paper or wood, we shall be satisfactory and grotesque enough.

Proc. Roy. Irish Acad., 1-379:

"In the year 1686, some workmen, who had been fetching water from a pond, seven German miles from Memel, on returning to their work, after dinner (during which there had been a snow storm) found the flat ground around the pond covered with a coal-black, leafy mass; and a person who lived near said he had seen it fall like flakes with the snow."

Some of these flake-like formations were as large as a table-top.

"The mass was damp and smelt disagreeably, like rotten seaweed, but, when dried, the smell went off.

"It tore fibrously like paper."

Classic explanation:

"Up from one place, and down in another."

But what went up, from one place, in a whirlwind? Of course, our Intermediatist acceptance is that had this been the strangest substance conceivable, from the strangest other world that could be thought of; somewhere upon this earth there must be a substance similar to it, or from which it would, at least subjectively, or according to description, not be easily distinguishable. Or that everything in New York City is only another degree or aspect of something, or combination of things, in a village of Central Africa. The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you; some one will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago. Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate all other things, if they have not surrendered and submitted to some higher attempt. It was cosmic that these scientists, who had surrendered to and submitted to the Scientific System, should, consistently with the principles of the system, attempt to assimilate the substance that fell at Memel with some known terrestrial product. At the meeting of the Royal Irish Academy it was brought out that there is a substance, of rather rare occurrence, that has been known to form in thin sheets upon marsh land.

It looks like greenish felt.

The substance of Memel:

Damp, coal-black, leafy mass.

But, if broken up, the marsh-substance is flake-like, and it tears fibrously.

An elephant can be identified as a sunflower--both have long stems. A camel is indistinguishable from a peanut--if only their humps be considered.

Trouble with this book is that we'll end up a lot of intellectual roués: we'll be incapable of being astonished with anything. We knew, to start with, that science and imbecility are continuous; nevertheless so many expressions of the merging-point are at first startling. We did think that Prof. Hitchcock's performance in identifying the Amherst phenomenon as a fungus was rather notable as scientific vaudeville, if we acquit him of the charge of seriousness--or that, in a place where fungi are so common that, before a given evening two of them sprang up, only he, a stranger in this very fungiferous place, knew a fungus when he saw something like a fungus--if we disregard its quick liquefaction, for instance. It was only a monologue, however: now we have an all-star cast: and they're not only Irish; they're royal Irish.

The royal Irishmen excluded "coal-blackness" and included fibrousness: so then that this substance was "marsh-paper," which "had been raised into the air by storms of wind, and had again fallen."

Second act:

It was said that, according to M. Ehrenburg, "the meteor-paper was found to consist partly of vegetable matter, chiefly of conifervæ."

Third act:

Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen:

Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited.

Their composition was chiefly of conifervæ.

This was a double inclusion: or it's the method of agreement that logicians make so much of. So no logician would be satisfied with identifying a peanut as a camel, because both have humps: he demands accessory agreement--that both can live a long time without water, for instance.

Now, it's not so very unreasonable, at least to the free and easy vaudeville standards that, throughout this book, we are considering, to think that a green substance could be snatched up from one place in a whirlwind, and fall as a black substance somewhere else: but the royal Irishmen excluded something else, and it is a datum that was accessible to them as it is to me:

That, according to Chladni, this was no little, local deposition that was seen to occur by some indefinite person living near a pond somewhere.

It was a tremendous fall from a vast sky-area.

Likely enough all the marsh paper in the world could not have supplied it.

At the same time, this substance was falling "in great quantities," in Norway and Pomerania. Or see Kirkwood, Meteoric Astronomy, p. 66:

"Substance like charred paper fell in Norway and other parts of northern Europe, Jan. 31, 1686."

Or a whirlwind, with a distribution as wide as that, would not acceptably, I should say, have so specialized in the rare substance called "marsh paper." There'd have been falls of fence rails, roofs of houses, parts of trees. Nothing is said of the occurrence of a tornado in northern Europe, in January, 1686. There is record only of this one substance having fallen in various places.

Time went on, but the conventional determination to exclude data of all falls to this earth, except of substances of this earth, and of ordinary meteoric matter, strengthened.

Annals of Philosophy, 16-68:

The substance that fell in January, 1686, is described as "a mass of black leaves, having the appearance of burnt paper, but harder, and cohering, and brittle."

"Marsh paper" is not mentioned, and there is nothing said of the "conifervæ," which seemed so convincing to the royal Irishmen. Vegetable composition is disregarded, quite as it might be by some one who might find it convenient to identify a crook-necked squash as a big fish hook.

Meteorites are usually covered with a black crust, more or less scale-like. The substance of 1686 is black and scale-like. If so be convenience, leaf-likeness is scale-likeness. In this attempt to assimilate with the conventional, we are told that the substance is a mineral mass: that it is like the black scales that cover meteorites.

The scientist who made this "identification" was von Grotthus. He had appealed to the god Chemical Analysis. Or the power and glory of mankind--with which we're not always so impressed--but the gods must tell us what we want them to tell us. We see again that, though nothing has identity of its own, anything can be "identified" as anything. Or there's nothing that's not reasonable, if one snoopeth not into its exclusions. But here the conflict did not end. Berzelius examined the substance. He could not find nickel in it. At that time, the presence of nickel was the "positive" test of meteoritic matter. Whereupon, with a suppositious "positive" standard of judgment against him, von Grotthus revoked his "identification." (Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist., 1-3-185).

This equalization of eminences permits us to project with our own expression, which, otherwise, would be subdued into invisibility:

That it's too bad that no one ever looked to see--hieroglyphics?--something written upon these sheets of paper?

If we have no very great variety of substances that have fallen to this earth; if, upon this earth's surface there is infinite variety of substances detachable by whirlwinds, two falls of such a rare substance as marsh paper would be remarkable.

A writer in the Edinburgh Review, 87-194, says that at the time of writing, he had before him a portion of a sheet of 200 square feet, of a substance that had fallen at Carolath, Silesia, in 1839--exactly similar to cotton-felt, of which clothing might have been made. The god Microscopic Examination had spoken. The substance consisted chiefly of conifervæ.

Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, 1847-pt. 1-193:

That March 16, 1846--about the time of a fall of edible substance in Asia Minor--an olive-gray powder fell at Shanghai. Under the microscope, it was seen to be an aggregation of hairs of two kinds, black ones and rather thick white ones. They were supposed to be mineral fibres, but, when burned, they gave out "the common ammonical smell and smoke of burnt hair or feathers." The writer described the phenomenon as "a cloud of 3800 square miles of fibers, alkali, and sand." In a postscript, he says that other investigators, with more powerful microscopes, gave opinion that the fibres were not hairs; that the substance consisted chiefly of conifervæ.

Or the pathos of it, perhaps; or the dull and uninspired, but courageous persistence of the scientific: everything seemingly found out is doomed to be subverted--by more powerful microscopes and telescopes; by more refined, precise, searching means and methods--the new pronouncements irrepressibly bobbing up; their reception always as Truth at last; always the illusion of the final; very little of the Intermediatist spirit --

That the new that has displaced the old will itself some day be displaced; that it, too, will be recognized as myth-stuff --

But that if phantoms climb, spooks of ladders are good enough for them.

Annual Register, 1821-681:

That, according to a report by M. Lainé, French Consul at Pernambuco, early in October, 1821, there was a shower of a substance resembling silk. The quantity was tremendous as might be a whole cargo, lost somewhere between Jupiter and Mars, having drifted around perhaps for centuries, the original fabrics slowly disintegrating. In Annales de Chimie, 2-15-427, it is said that samples of this substance were sent to France by M. Lainé, and that they proved to have some resemblances to silky filaments which, at certain times of the year, are carried by the wind near Paris.

In the Annals of Philosophy, n.s., 12-93, there is mention of a fibrous substance like blue silk that fell near Naumberg, March 23, 1665. According to Chladni (Annales de Chimie, 2-31-264), the quantity was great. He places a question mark before the date.

One of the advantages of Intermediatism is that, in the oneness of quasiness, there can be no mixed metaphors. Whatever is acceptable of anything, is, in some degree or aspect, acceptable of everything. So it is quite proper to speak, for instance, of something that is as firm as a rock and that sails in a majestic march. The Irish are good monists: they have of course been laughed at for their keener perceptions. So it's a book we're writing, or it's a procession, or it's a museum, with a Chamber of Horrors rather over-emphasized. A rather horrible correlation occurs in the Scientific American, 1859-178. What interests us is that a correspondent saw a silky substance fall from the sky--there was an aurora borealis at the time--he attributes the substance to the aurora.

Since the time of Darwin, the classic explanation has been that all silky substances that fall from the sky are spider webs. In 1832, aboard the Beagle, at the mouth of La Plata River, 60 miles from land, Darwin saw an enormous number of spiders, of the kind usually known as "gossamer" spiders, little aeronauts that cast out filaments by which the wind carries them.

It's difficult to express that silky substances that have fallen to this earth were not spider webs. My own acceptance is that spider webs are the merger; that there have been falls of an externally derived silky substance, and also of the webs, or strands, rather, of aeronautic spiders indigenous to this earth; that in some instances it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. Of course, our expression upon silky substances will merge away into expressions upon other seeming textile substances, and I don't know how much better off we'll be --

Except that, if fabricable materials have fallen from the sky --

Simply to establish acceptance of that may be doing well enough in this book of first and tentative explorations.

In All the Year Round, 8-254, is described a fall that took place in England, Sept. 21, 1741, in the towns of Bradly, Selbourne, and Alresford, and in a triangular space included by these three towns. The substance is described as "cobwebs"--but it fell in flake-formation, or in "flakes or rags about one inch broad and five or six long." Also these flakes were of a relatively heavy substance-- "they fell with some velocity." The quantity was great--the shortest side of the triangular space is eight miles long. In the Wernerian Nat. Hist. Soc. Trans., 5-386, it is said that there were two falls--that they were some hours apart--a datum that is becoming familiar to us--a datum that can not be taken into the fold, unless we find it repeated over and over and over again. It is said that the second fall lasted from nine o'clock in the morning until night.

Now the hypnosis of the classic--that what we call intelligence is only an expression of inequilibrium; that when mental adjustments are made, intelligence ceases--or, of course, that intelligence is the confession of ignorance. If you have intelligence upon any subject, that is something you're still learning--if we agree that that which is learned is always mechanically done--in quasi-terms, of course, because nothing is ever finally learned.

It was decided that this substance was spiders' web. That was adjustment. But it's not adjustment to me; so I'm afraid I shall have some intelligence in this matter. If I ever arrive at adjustment upon this subject, then, upon this subject, I shall be able to have no thoughts, except routine-thoughts. I haven't yet quite decided absolutely everything, so I am able to point out:

That this substance was of quantity so enormous that it attracted wide attention when it came down --

That it would have been equally noteworthy when it went up --

That there is no record of anyone, in England or elsewhere, having seen tons of "spider webs" going up, September, 1741.

Further confession of intelligence upon my part:

That, if it be contested, then, that the place of origin may have been far away, but still terrestrial --

Then it's that other familiar matter of incredible "marksmanship" again--hitting a small, triangular space for hours--interval of hours--then from nine in the morning until

night: same triangular space.

These are the disregards of the classic explanation. There is no mention of spiders having been seen to fall, but a good inclusion is that, though this substance fell in good-sized flakes of considerable weight, it was viscous. In this respect it was like cobwebs: dogs nosing it in the grass, were blindfolded with it. This circumstance does strongly suggest cobwebs --

Unless we can accept that, in regions aloft, there are vast viscous or gelatinous areas, and that things passing through become daubed. Or perhaps we clear up the confusion in the descriptions of the substance that fell in 1841 and 1846, in Asia Minor, described in one publication as gelatinous, and in another as a cereal--that it was a cereal that had passed through a gelatinous region. That the paper-like substance at Memel may have had such an experience may be indicated in that Ehrenberg found in it gelatinous matter, which he called "nostoc." (Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist., 1-3-185.)

Scientific American, 45-337:

Fall of a substance described as "cobwebs," latter part of October, 1881, in Milwaukee, Wis., and other towns: other towns mentioned are Green Bay, Vesburge, Fort Howard, Sheboygan, and Ozaukee. The aeronautic spiders are known as "gossamer" spiders, because of the extreme lightness of the filaments that they cast out to the wind. Of the substance that fell in Wisconsin, it is said:

"In all instances the webs were strong in texture and very white."

The Editor says:

"Curiously enough, there is no mention, in any of the reports that we have seen, of the presence of spiders."

So our attempt to divorce a possible external product from its terrestrial merger: then our joy of the prospector who thinks he's found something.

The Monthly Weather Review, 26-566, quotes the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser:

That, upon Nov. 21, 1898, numerous batches of spider-web-like substance fell in Montgomery, in strands and in occasional masses several inches long and several inches broad. According to the writer, it was not spiders' web, but something like asbestos; also that it was phosphorescent.

The Editor of the Review says that he see no reason for doubting that these masses were cobwebs.

La Nature, 1883-342:

A correspondent writes that he sends a sample of a substance said to have fallen at Montussan (Gironde), Oct. 16, 1883. According to a witness, quoted by the correspondent, a thick cloud, accompanied by rain and a violent wind, had appeared. This cloud was composed of a woolly substance in lumps the size of a fist, which fell to the ground. The Editor (Tissandier) says of this substance that it was white, but was something that had been burned. It was fibrous. M. Tissandier astonishes us by saying that he can not identify this substance. We thought that anything could be "identified" as anything. He can only say that the cloud in question must have been an extraordinary conglomeration.

Annual Register, 1832-447:
 

That, March, 1832, there fell, in the fields of Kourianof, Russia, a combustible yellowish substance, covering, at least two inches thick, an area of 600 or 700 square feet. It was resinous and yellowish: so one inclines to the conventional explanation that it was pollen from pine trees--but, when torn, it had the tenacity of cotton. When placed in water, it had the consistency of resin. "This resin had the color of amber, was elastic, like India rubber, and smelled like prepared oil mixed with wax."

So in general our notion of cargoes--and our notion of cargoes of food supplies:

In Philosophical Transactions, 19-224, is an extract from a letter by Mr. Robert Vans, of Kilkenny, Ireland, dated Nov. 15, 1695: that there had been "of late," in the counties of Limerick and Tipperary, showers of a sort of matter like butter or grease...having "a very stinking smell."

There follows an extract from a letter by the Bishop of Cloyne, upon "a very odd phenomenon," which was observed in Munster and Leinster: that for a good part of the spring of 1695 there fell a substance which the country people called "butter"--"soft, clammy, and of a dark yellow"--that cattle fed "indifferently" in fields where this substance lay.

"It fell in lumps as big as the end of one's finger." It had a "strong ill scent." His Grace calls it a "stinking dew."

In Mr. Vans' letter, it is said that the "butter" was supposed to have medicinal properties, and "was gathered in pots and other vessels by some of the inhabitants of this place."

And:

In all the following volumes of Philosophical Transactions there is no speculation upon this extraordinary subject. Ostracism. The fate of this datum is a good instance of damnation, not by denial, and not by explaining away, but by simple disregard. The fall is listed by Chladni, and is mentioned in other catalogs, but, from the absence of all inquiry, and of all but formal mention, we see that it has been under excommunication as much as was ever anything by the preceding system. The datum has been buried alive. It is as irreconcilable with the modern system of dogmas as ever were geologic strata and vermiform appendix with the preceding system --

If, intermittently, or "for a good part of the spring," this substance fell in two Irish provinces, and nowhere else, we have, stronger than before, a sense of a stationary region overhead, or a region that receives products like this earth's products, but from external sources, a region in which this earth's gravitational and meteorological forces are relatively inert--if for many weeks a good part of this substance did hover before finally falling. We suppose that, in 1685, Mr. Vans and the Bishop of Cloyne could describe what they saw as well as could witnesses in 1885: nevertheless, it is going far back; we shall have to have many modern instances before we can accept.

As to other falls, or another fall, it is said in the American Journal of Science, 1-28-361, that, April 11, 1832--about a month after the fall of the substance of Kourianof--fell a substance that was wine-yellow, transparent, soft, and smelling like rancid oil. M. Herman, a chemist who examined it, named it "sky oil." For analysis and chemic reactions, see the Journal. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 13-368, mentions an "unctuous" substance that fell near Rotterdam, in 1832. In Comptes Rendus, 13-215, there is an account of an oily, reddish matter that fell at Genoa, February, 1841.

Whatever it may have been --

Altogether, most of our difficulties are problems that we should leave to later developers of super-geography, I think. A discoverer of America should leave Long Island to someone else. If there be, plying back and forth from Jupiter and Mars and Venus, super-constructions that are sometimes wrecked, we think of fuel as well as cargoes. Of course the most convincing data would be of coal falling from the sky: nevertheless, one does suspect that oil-burning engines were discovered ages ago in more advanced worlds--but, as I say, we should leave something to our disciples--so we'll not especially wonder whether these butter-like, or oily substances were food or fuel. So we merely note that in the Scientific American, 24-323, is an account of hail that fell, in the middle of April, 1871, in Mississippi, in which was a substance described as turpentine.

Something that tasted like orange water, in hailstones, about the first of June, 1842, near Nimes, France; identified as nitric acid (Jour. de Pharmacie, 1845-273).

Hail and ashes, in Ireland, 1755 (Sci. Amer., 5-168).

That, at Elizabeth, N.J., June 9, 1874, fell hail in which was a [63/64] substance, said, by Prof. Leeds, of Stevens Institute, to be carbonate of soda (Sci. Amer., 30-262).

We are getting a little away from the lines of our composition, but it will be an important point later that so many extraordinary falls have occurred with hail. Or--if they were of substances that had had origin upon some other part of this earth's surface--had the hail, too, that origin? Our acceptance here will depend upon the number of instances. Reasonably enough, some of the things that fall to this earth should coincide with falls of hail.

As to vegetable substances in quantities so great as to suggest lost cargoes, we have a note in the Intellectual Observer, 3-468: that upon the first of May, 1863, a rain fell at Perpignan, "bringing down with it a red substance, which proved, on examination, to be a red meal mixed with fine sand." At various points along the Mediterranean, this substance fell.

There is, in Philosophical Transactions, 16-281, an account of a seeming cereal, said to have fallen in Wiltshire, in 1686--said that some of the "wheat" fell enclosed in hailstones--but the writer in Transactions, says that he had examined the grains, and that they were nothing but seeds of ivy berries dislodged from holes and chinks where birds had hidden them. If birds still hide ivy seeds, and if winds still blow, I don't see why the phenomenon has not repeated in more than two hundred years since.

Or the red matter in rain, at Siena, Italy, May, 1830; said, by Arago, to have been vegetable matter, (Arago, Oeuvres, 12-468).

Somebody should collect data of falls at Siena alone.

In the Monthly Weather Review, 29-465, a correspondent writes that, upon Feb. 16, 1901, at Pawpaw, Michigan, upon a day that was so calm that his windmill did not run, fell a brown dust that looked like vegetable matter. The Editor of the Review concludes that this was no widespread fall from a tornado, because it had been reported from nowhere else.

Rancidness--putridity--decomposition--a note that has been struck many times. In a positive sense, of course, nothing means anything, or every meaning is continuous with all other meanings: of that all evidences of guilt, for instance, are just as good evidences of innocence--but this condition seems to mean--things lying around among the stars a long time. Horrible disaster in the time of Julius Caesar; remains from it not reaching this earth till the time of the Bishop of Cloyne: we leave to later research the discussion of bacterial action and decomposition, and whether bacteria could survive in what we call space, of which we know nothing --

Chemical News, 35-182:

Dr. A.T. Machattie, F.C.S., writes that, at London, Ontario, Feb. 24, 1868, in a violent storm, fell, with snow, a dark-colored substance, estimated at 500 tons, over a belt 50 miles by 10 miles. It was examined under a microscope, by Dr. Machattie, who found it to consist mainly of vegetable matter "far advanced in decomposition." The substance was examined by Dr. James Adams, of Glascow, who gave his opinion that it was the remains of cereals. Dr. Machattie points out that for months before this fall the ground of Canada had been frozen, so that in this case a more than ordinary remote origin has to be thought of. Dr. Machattie thinks of origin to the south. "However, this," he says, "is mere conjecture."

Amer. Jour. Sci., 1841-40:

That, March 24, 1840--during a thunderstorm--at Rajkit, India, occurred a fall of grain. It was reported by Col. Sykes, of the British Association.

The natives were greatly excited--because it was grain of a kind unknown to them.

Usually comes forward a scientist who knows more of the things that natives know best than the natives know--but it so happens that the usual thing was not done definitely in this instance:

"The grain was shown to some botanists, who did not immediately recognize it, but thought to be either a spartium or a vicia."

Book of the Damned Chapter VI

LEAD, silver, diamonds, glass.

They sound like the accursed, but they're not: they're now of the chosen--that is, when they occur in metallic or stony masses that Science has recognized as meteorites. We find that resistance is to substances not so mixed in or incorporated.

Of accursed data, it seems to me that punk is pretty damnable. In the Report of the British Association, 1878-376, there is mention of a light chocolate-brown substance that has fallen with meteorites. No particulars given; not another mention anywhere else that I can find. In this English publication, the word "punk" is not used; the substance is called "amadou." I suppose, if the datum has anywhere been admitted to French publications, the word "amadou" has been avoided, and "punk" used.

Or oneness of allness: scientific works and social registers: a Goldstein who can't get in as Goldstein, gets in as Jackson.

The fall of sulphur from the sky has been especially repulsive to the modern orthodoxy--largely because of its associations with the superstitions or principles of the preceding orthodoxy--stories of devils: sulphurous exhalations. Several writers have said that they have had this feeling. So the scientific reactionists, who have rabidly fought the preceding, because it was the preceding: and the scientific prudes, who, in sheer exclusionism, have held lean hands over pale eyes, denying falls of sulphur. I have many notes upon the sulphurous odor of meteorites, and many notes upon phosphorescence of things that come from externality. Some day I shall look over old stories of demons that have appeared sulphurously upon this earth, with the idea of expressing that we have often had undesirable visitors from other worlds; or that an indication of external derivation is sulphurousness. I expect some day to rationalize demonology, but just at present we are scarcely far enough advanced to go so far back.

For a circumstantial account of a mass of burning sulphur, about the size of a man's fist, that fell at Pultusk, Poland, Jan. 30, 1868, upon a road, where it was stamped out by a crowd of villagers, see Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1874-272.

The power of the exclusionists lies in that in their stand are combined both modern and archaic systematists. Falls of sandstone and limestone are repulsive to both theologians and scientists. Sandstone and limestone suggest other worlds upon which occur processes like geological processes; but limestone, as a fossiliferous substance, is of course especially of the unchosen.

In Science, March 9, 1888, we read of a block of limestone, said to have fallen near Middleburgh, Florida. It was exhibited at the Sub-tropical Exposition, at Jacksonville. The writer, in Science, denies that it fell from the sky. His reasoning is:

There is no limestone in the sky;

Therefore this limestone did not fall from the sky.

Better reasoning I cannot conceive of--because we see that a final major premise--universal--true--would include all things: that, then, would leave nothing to reason about--so then that all reasoning must be based upon "something" not universal, or only a phantom intermediate to the two finalities of nothingness and allness, or negativeness and positiveness.

La Nature 1890-2-127:

Fall, at Pel-et-Der (L'Aube) France, June 6, 1890, of limestone pebbles. Identified with limestone at Chateau Landon--or up and down in a whirlwind. But they fell with hail--which, in June, could not very well be identified with ice from Chateau-Landon. Coincidence, perhaps.

Upon page 70, Science Gossip, 1887, the Editor says, of a stone that was reported to have fallen at Little Lever, England, that a sample had been sent to him. It was sandstone. Therefore it had not fallen, but had been on the ground in the first place. But, upon page 140, Science Gossip, 1887, is an account of "a large, smooth, waterworn, gritty sandstone pebble" that had been found in the wood of a full-grown beech tree. Looks to me as if it had fallen red-hot, and had penetrated the tree with high velocity. But I have never heard of anything falling red-hot from a whirlwind--

The wood around this sandstone pebble was black, as if charred.

Dr. Farrington, for instance, in his books, does not even mention sandstone. However, the British Association, though reluctant, is less exclusive: Report of 1860, p. 107: substance about the size of a duck's egg, that fell at Raphoe, Ireland, June 9, 1860--date questioned. It is not definitely said that this substance was sandstone, but that it "resembled" friable sandstone.

Falls of salt have occurred often. They have been avoided by scientific writers, because of the dictum that only water and not substances held in solution, can be raised by evaporation. However, falls of salty water have received attention from Dalton and others, and have been attributed to whirlwinds from the sea. This is reasonably contested--quasi-reasonably--as to places not far from the sea--

But the fall of salt that occurred high in the mountains of Switzerland--

We could have predicted that that datum could be found somewhere. Let anything be explained in local terms of the coast of England--but also has it occurred high in the mountains of Switzerland.

Large crystals of salt fell--in a hailstorm--Aug. 20, 1870, in Switzerland. The orthodox explanation is a crime: whoever made it should have had his finger-prints taken. We are told (An. Rec. Sci., 1872) that these objects of salt "came over the Mediterranean from some part of Africa."

Or the hypnosis of the conventional--provided it be glib. One reads such an assertion, and provided it be suave and brief and conventional, one seldom questions--or thinks "very strange" and then forgets. One has an impression from geography lessons: Mediterranean not more than three inches wide, on the map; Switzerland only a few more inches away. These sizable masses of salt are described in the Amer. Jour. Sci., 3-3-239, as "essentially imperfect cubic crystals of common salt." As to occurrence with hail--that can in one, or ten, or twenty instances be called a coincidence.

Another datum: extraordinary year 1883:

London Times, Dec. 25, 1883:

Translation from a Turkish newspaper; a substance that fell at Scutari, Dec. 2, 1883; described as an unknown substance, in particles--or flakes?--like snow. "It was found to be saltish to the taste, and to dissolve readily in water."

Miscellaneous:

"Black capillary matter" that fell, Nov. 16, 1857, at Charleston, S. C., (Amer. Jour. Sci., 2-31-459).

Fall of small, friable, vesicular masses, from the size of a pea to size of a walnut, at Lobau, Jan. 18, 1835 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-85).

Objects that fell at Peshawur, India, June, 1893, during a storm: substance that looked like crystallized nitre, and that tasted like sugar (Nature, July 13, 1893).

I suppose sometimes deep-sea fishes have their noses bumped by cinders. If their regions be subjacent to Cunard or White Star routes, they're especially likely to be bumped. I conceive of no inquiry: they're deep-sea fishes.

Or the slag of Slains. That it was a furnace-product. The Rev. James Rust seemed to feel bumped. He tried in vain to arouse inquiry.

As to a report, from Chicago, April 9, 1879, that slag had fallen from the sky, Prof. E.S. Bastian (Amer. Jour. Sci., 3-18-78) says that the slag had been on the ground in the first place. It was furnace-slag. "A chemical examination of the specimens has shown they possess none of the characteristics of true meteorites."

Over and over and over again, the universal delusion; hope and despair of attempted positivism; that there can be real criteria, or distinct characteristics of anything. If anybody can define--not merely suppose, like Prof. Bastian, that he can define--the true characteristics of anything, or so localize trueness anywhere, he makes the discovery for which the cosmos is laboring. He will be instantly translated, like Elijah into the Positive Absolute. My own notion is that, in a moment of super-concentration, Elijah became so nearly a real prophet that he was translated to heaven, or to the Positive Absolute, with such velocity that he left an incandescent train behind him. As we go along, we shall find the "true test of meteoric material," which in the past has been taken as an absolute, dissolving into almost utmost nebulosity. Prof. Bastian explains mechanically, or in terms of the usual reflexes to all reports of unwelcome substances: that near where the slag had been found, telegraph wires had been struck by lightning; that particles of melted wire had been seen to fall near the slag--which had been on the ground in the first place. But, according to the N. Y. Times, April 14, 1879, about two bushels of this substance had fallen.

Something that was said to have fallen at Darmstadt, June 7, 1846; listed by Greg (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1867-416) as "only a slag."

Philosophical Magazine, 4-10-381:

That, in 1855, a large stone was found far in the interior of a tree, in Battersea Fields.

Sometimes cannon balls are found embedded in trees. Doesn't seem to be anything to discuss; doesn't seem discussable that any one would cut a hole in a tree and hide a cannon ball, which one could take to bed, and hide under one's pillow, just as easily. So with the stone of Battersea Fields. What is there to say, except that it fell with high velocity and embedded in the tree? Nevertheless, there was a great deal of discussion--

Because, at the foot of the tree, as if broken off the stone, fragments of slag were found.

I have nine other instances.

Slag and cinders and ashes, and you won't believe, and neither will I, that they came from the furnaces of vast aerial super-constructions. We'll see what looks acceptable.

As to ashes, the difficulties are great, because we'd expect many falls of terrestrially derived ashes--volcanoes and forest fires.

In some of our acceptances, I have felt a little radical--

I suppose that one of our main motives is to show that there is, in quasi-existence, nothing but the preposterous--or something intermediate to absolute preposterousness and final reasonableness--that the new is the obviously preposterous; that it becomes the established and disguisedly preposterous; that it is displaced, after a while, and is again seen to be the preposterous. Or that all progress is from the outrageous to the academic or sanctified, and back to the outrageous--modified, however, by a trend of higher and higher approximation to the impreposterous. Sometimes I feel a little more uninspired than at other times, but I think we're pretty well accustomed now to the oneness of allness; or that the methods of science in maintaining its system are as outrageous as the attempts of the damned to break in. In the Annual Record of Science, 1875-241, Prof. Daubrée is quoted: that ashes that had fallen in the Azores had come from the Chicago fire --

Or the damned and the saved, and there's little to choose between them; and angels are beings that have not obviously barbed tails to them--or never have such bad manners as to stroke an angel below the waist-line.

However this especial outrage was challenged: the Editor of the Record returns to it, in the issue of 1876: considers it "in the highest degree improper to say that the ashes of Chicago were landed in the Azores."

Bull. Soc. Astro. de France, 22-245:

Account of a white substance, like ashes, that fell at Annoy, France, March 27, 1908: simply called a curious phenomenon; no attempt to trace to a terrestrial source.

Flake formations, which may signify passage through a region of pressure, are common; but spherical formations--as if of things that have rolled and rolled along planar regions somewhere--are commoner:

Nature, Jan. 10, 1884, quotes a Kimberly newspaper:

That, toward the close of November, 1883, a thick shower of ashy matter fell at Queenstown, South Africa. The matter was in marble-sized balls, which were soft and pulpy, but which, upon drying, crumbled at touch. The shower was confined to one narrow streak of land. It would be only ordinarily preposterous to attribute this substance to Krakatoa--

But, with the fall, loud noises were heard--

But I'll omit many notes upon ashes: if ashes should sift down upon deep-sea fishes, that is not to say that they came from steamships.

Data of falls of cinders have been especially damned by Mr. Symons, the meteorologist, some of whose investigations we'll investigate later--nevertheless--

Notice of a fall, in Victoria, Australia, April 14, 1875 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1875-242)--at least we are told, in the reluctant way, that someone "thought" he saw matter fall near him at night, and the next day found something that looked like cinders.

In the Proc. of the London Roy. Soc., 19-122, there is an account of cinders that fell on the deck of a lightship, Jan. 9, 1873. In the Amer. Jour. Sci., 2-24-449, there is a notice that the Editor had received a specimen of cinders said to have fallen--in showery weather--upon a farm, near Ottowa, Illinois, Jan. 17, 1857.

But after all, ambiguous things they are, cinders or ashes or slag or clinkers, the high priest of the accursed that must speak aloud for us is--coal that has fallen from the sky.

Or coke:

The person who thought he saw something like cinders, also thought he saw something like coke, we are told.

Nature, 36-119:

Something that "looked exactly like coke" that fell--during a thunder storm--in the Orne, France, April 24, 1887.

Or charcoal:

Dr. Angus Smith, in the Lit. and Phil. Soc. of Manchester Memoirs, 2-9-146, says that, about 1827--like a great deal in Lyell's Principles and Darwin's Origin, this account is from hearsay--something fell from the sky, near Allport, England. It fell luminously, with a loud report, and scattered in a field. A fragment that was seen by Dr. Smith, is described by him as having "the appearance of a piece of common wood charcoal." Nevertheless, the reassured feeling of the faithful, upon reading this, is burdened with data of differences: the substance was so uncommonly heavy that it seemed as if it had iron in it; also there was "a sprinkling of sulphur." This material is said, by Prof. Baden-Powell, to be "totally unlike that of any other meteorite." Greg, in his catalogue (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-73) calls it "a more than doubtful substance"--but again, against reassurance, this is not doubt of authenticity. Greg says that it is like compact charcoal, with particles of sulphur and iron pyrites embedded.

Reassurance rises again:

Prof. Baden-Powell says: "It contains also charcoal, which might perhaps be acquired from matter among which it fell."

This is a common reflex with the exclusionists: that substances not "truly meteoritic" did not fall from the sky, but were picked up by "truly meteoritic" things, of course only on their surfaces, by impact with this earth.

Rhythm of reassurances and their declines:

According to Dr. Smith, this substance was not merely coated with charcoal; his analysis gives 43.59 per cent carbon.

Our acceptance that coal has fallen from the sky will be via data of resinous substances and bituminous substances, which merge so that they can not be told apart.

Resinous substance said to have fallen at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1887 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-94).

A resinous substance that fell after a fireball? at Neuhaus, Bohemia, Dec. 17, 1824 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-70).

Fall, July 28, 1885, at Luchon, during a storm, of a brownish substance; very friable, carbonaceous matter; when burned it gave out a resinous odor (Comptes Rendus, 103-837).

Substance that fell Feb. 17, 18, 19, 1841, at Genoa, Italy, said to have been resinous; said by Arago (Oeuvres, 12-469) to have been bituminous matter and sand.

Fall--during a thunderstorm--July, 1681, near Cape Cod, upon the deck of an English vessel, the Albemarle, of "burning, bituminous matter" (Edin. New Phil. Jour., 26-86); a fall at Christiana, Norway, June 13, 1822, of bituminous matter, listed by Greg as doubtful; fall of bituminous matter, in Germany, March 8, 1798, listed by Greg. Lockyer, (The Meteoric Hypothesis, p. 24) says that the substance that fell at the Cape of Good Hope, Oct. 13, 1838--about five cubic feet of it: substance so soft that it was cuttable with a knife--"after being experimented upon, it left a residue, which gave out a very bituminous smell."

And this inclusion of Lockyer's--so far as findable in all books that I have read--is, in books, about as close as we can get to our desideratum--that coal has fallen from the sky. Dr. Farrington, except with a brief mention, ignores the whole subject of the fall of carbonaceous matter from the sky. Proctor, in all of his books that I have read--is, in books, about as close as we can get to duction to the Study of Meteorites," p. 53) excommunicates with the admission that carbonaceous has been found in meteorites "in very minute quantities"--or my own suspicion is that it is possible to damn something else only by losing one's own soul--quasi-soul, of course.

Sci. Amer., 35-120:

That the substance that fell at the Cape of Good Hope "resembled a piece of anthracite coal more than anything else."

It's a mistake, I think: the resemblance is to bituminous coal--but it is from the periodicals that we must get our data. To the writers of books upon meteorites, it would be as wicked--by which we mean departure from the characters of an established species--quasi-established, of course--to say that coal has fallen from the sky, as would be, to something in a barnyard, a temptation that it climb a tree and catch a bird. Domestic things in a barnyard: and how wild things from forests outside seem to them. Or the homeopathist--but we shall shovel data of coal.

And, if over and over, we shall learn of masses of soft coal that have fallen upon this earth, if in no instance has it been asserted that the masses did not fall, but were upon the ground in the first place; if we have many instances, this time we turn down good and hard the mechanical reflex that these masses were carried from one place to another in whirlwinds, because we find it too difficult to accept that whirlwinds could so select, or so specialize in a peculiar substance. Among writers of books, the only one I know of who makes more than brief mention is Sir Robert Ball. He represents a still more antique orthodoxy, or is an exclusionist of the old type, still holding out against even meteorites. He cites several falls of carbonaceous matter, but with disregards that make for reasonableness that earthy matter may have been caught up by whirlwinds and flung down somewhere else. If he had given a full list, he would be called upon to explain the special affinity of whirlwinds for a special kind of coal. He does not give a full list. We shall have all that's findable, and we shall see that against this disease we're writing, the homeopathist's prescription availeth not. Another exclusionist was Prof. Lawrence Smith. His psycho-tropism was to respond to all reports of carbonaceous matter falling from the sky, by saying that this damned matter had been deposited upon things of the chosen by impact with this earth. Most of our data antedate him, or were contemporaneous with him, or were as accessible to him as to us. In his attempted positivism it is simply--and beautifully--disregarded that, according to Bethelot, Berzelius, Cloez, Wohler and others these masses are not merely coated with carbonaceous matter, but are carbonaceous throughout, or are permeated throughout. How any one could so resolutely and dogmatically and beautifully and blindly hold out, would puzzle us were it not for our acceptance that only to think is to exclude and include; and to exclude some things that have as much right to come in as have the included--that to have an opinion upon any subject is to be a Lawrence Smith--because there is no definite subject.

Dr. Walter Flight (Eclectic Magazine, 89-71) says, of the substance that fell near Alais, France, March 15, 1806, that it "emits a faint bituminous substance" when heated, according to the observations of Berzelius and a commission appointed by the French Academy. This time we have not the reluctances expressed in such words as "like" and "resembling." We are told that this substance is "an earthy kind of coal."

As to "minute quantities" we are told that the substance that fell at the Cape of Good Hope has in it a little more than a quarter of organic matter, which, in alcohol, gives the familiar reaction of yellow, resinous matter. Other instances given by Dr. Flight are:

Carbonaceous matter that fell in 1840, in Tennessee; Cranbourne, Australia, 1861; Montauban, France, May 14, 1864 (twenty masses, some of them as large as a human head; of a substance that "resembled a dull-colored earthy lignite"); Goalpara, India, about 1867 (about 8 per cent of a hydrocarbon); at Ornans, France, July 11, 1868; substance with "an organic, combustible ingredient," at Hessle, Sweden, Jan. 1, 1860.

Knowledge, 4-134: [74/75]

That, according to M. Daubrée, the substance that had fallen in the Argentine Republic, "resembled certain kinds of lignite and boghead coal." In Comptes Rendus, 96-1764, it is said that this mass fell, June 30, 1880, in the province Entre Rios, Argentina: that it is "like" brown coal; that it resembles all the other carbonaceous masses that have fallen from the sky.

Something that fell at Grazac, France, Aug. 10, 1885: when burned, it gave out a bituminous odor (Comptes Rendus, 104-1771).

Carbonaceous substance that fell at Rajpunta, India, Jan. 22, 1911: very friable: 50 per cent of it soluble in water (Records Geol. Survey of India, 44-pt. 1-41).

A combustible carbonaceous substance that fell with sand at Naples, March 14, 1818 (American Journal of Science, 1-1-309).

Sci. Amer. Supp., 29-11798:

That, June 9, 1889, a very friable substance, of a deep, greenish black color, fell at Mighei, Russia. It contained 5 per cent organic matter, which, when powdered and digested in alcohol, yielded, after evaporation, a bright yellow resin. In this mass was 2 per cent of an unknown mineral.

Cinders and ashes and slag and coke and charcoal and coal.

And the things that sometimes deep-sea fishes are bumped by.

Reluctances and the disguises or covered retreats of such words as "like" and "resemble"--or that conditions of Intermediateness forbid abrupt transitions--but that the spirit animating all Intermediateness is to achieve abrupt transitions--because, if anything could finally break away from its origin and environment, that would be a real thing--something not merging away indistinguishably with the surrounding. So all attempt to be original; all attempt to invent something that is more than mere extension or modification of the preceding, is positivism--or that if one could conceive of a device to catch flies, positively different from, or unrelated to, all other devices--up he'd shoot to heaven, or the Positive Absolute--leaving behind such an incandescent train that in one age it would be said that he had gone aloft in a fiery chariot, and in another age that he had been struck by lightning--

I'm collecting notes upon persons supposed to have been struck by lightning. I think that high approximation to positivism has often been achieved--instantaneous translation--residue of negativeness left behind, looking much like effects of a stroke of lightning. Some day I shall tell the story of the Marie Celeste--"properly," [75/76] as the Scientific American Supplement would say--mysterious disappearance of a sea captain, his family, and the crew --

Of positivists, by the route of Abrupt Transition, I think that Manet was notable--but that his approximation was held down by his intense relativity to the public--or that it is quite as impositive to flout and insult and defy as it is to crawl and placate. Of course, Manet began with continuity with Courbet and others, and then, between him and Monet there were mutual influences--but the spirit of abrupt difference is the spirit of positivism, and Manet's stand was against the dictum that all lights and shades must merge away suavely into one another and prepare for one another. So a biologist like De Vries represents positivism, or the breaking of Continuity, by trying to conceive of evolution by mutation--against the dogma of indistinguishable gradations by "minute variations." A Copernicus conceives of helio-centricity. Continuity is against him. He is not permitted to break abruptly with the past. He is permitted to publish his work, but only as "an interesting hypothesis."

Continuity--and that all that we call evolution or progress is attempt to break away from it--

That our whole solar system was at one time attempt by planets to break away from a parental nexus and set up individualities, and, failing, move in quasi-regular orbits that are expressions of relations with the sun and with one another, all having surrendered, being now quasi-incorporated in a higher approximation to system;

Intermediateness in its mineralogic aspect of positivism--or Iron that strove to break away from Sulphur and Oxygen, and be real, homogeneous Iron--failing, inasmuch as elemental iron exists only in text-book chemistry;

Intermediateness in its biologic aspect of positivism--or the wild, fantastic, grotesque, monstrous things it conceived of, sometimes in a frenzy of effort to break away abruptly from all preceding types--but failing, in the giraffe-effort, for instance, or only caricaturing an antelope--

All things break one relation only by the establishing of some other relation--

All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast.

So the fight of the exclusionists to maintain the traditional--or to prevent abrupt transition from the quasi-established--fighting so that here, more than a century after meteorites were included, no other notable inclusion has been made, except that of cosmic dust, [76/77] data of which Nordenskiold made more nearly real than data in opposition.

So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the preposterous, against Sir William H. Thomson's notions of arrival upon this earth of organisms on meteorites--

"I can only regard it as a jest" (Knowledge, 1-302).

Or that there is nothing but jest--or something intermediate to jest and tragedy;

That ours is not an existence but an utterance;

That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive--like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist--

That Momus is imagining us and our arts and sciences and religions, and is narrating or picturing us as a satire upon the gods' real existence.

Because--with many of our data of coal that has fallen from the sky as accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific pronouncement that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, by which we mean a consistent existence, or a state in which there is real intelligence, or a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably merge away with imbecility, could there have been such a row as that which was raised about forty years ago over Dr. Hahn's announcement that he had found fossils in meteorites?

Accessible to anybody at that time:

Philosophical Magazine, 4-17-425:

That the substance that fell at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1857, contained organic matter "analogous to fossil waxes."

Or limestone:

Of the block of limestone which was reported to have fallen at Middleburgh, Florida, it is said (Science, 11-118) that, though something had been seen to fall in "an old cultivated field," the witnesses who ran to it picked up something that "had been upon the ground in the first place." The writer who tells us this, with the usual exclusion-imagination, known as stupidity, but unjustly, because there is no real stupidity, thinks he can think of a good-sized stone that had for many years been in a cultivated field, but that had never been seen before--had never interfered with plowing, for instance. He is earnest and unjarred when he writes that this stone weighs 200 pounds. My own notion, founded upon my own experience in seeing, is that a block of stone weighing 500 pounds [77/78] might be in one's parlor twenty years, virtually unseen--but not in an old cultivated field, where it interfered with plowing--not anywhere--if it interfered.

Dr. Hahn said that he had found fossils in meteorites. There is a description of the corals, sponges, shells, and crinoids, all of them microscopic, which he photographed, in Popular Science, 20-83.

Dr. Hahn was a well-known scientist. He was better known after that.

Anybody may theorize upon other worlds and conditions upon them that are similar to our own conditions: if his notions be presented undisguisedly as fiction, or only as an "interesting hypothesis," he'll stir up no prude rages.

But Dr. Hahn said definitely that he had found fossils in specified meteorites: also he published photographs of them. His book is in the New York Public Library. In the reproductions every feature of some of the little shells is plainly marked. If they're not shells, neither are things under an oyster-counter. The striations are very plain: one sees even the hinges where bivalves are joined.

Prof. Lawrence Smith (Knowledge, 1-258):

"Dr. Hahn is a kind of half-insane man, whose imagination has run away with him."

Conservation of Continuity.

Then Dr. Weinland examined Dr. Hahn's specimens. He gave his opinion that they are fossils and that they are not crystals of enstatite, as asserted by Prof. Smith, who had never seen them.

The damnation of denial and the damnation of disregard:

After the publication of Dr. Weinland's findings--silence.

Book of the Damned Chapter VII

THE living things that have come down to this earth:

Attempts to preserve the system:

That small frogs and toads, for instance, never have fallen from the sky, but were--"on the ground, in the first place;" or that there have been such falls--"up from one place in a whirlwind, and down in another."

Were there some especially froggy place near Europe, as there is an especially sandy place, the scientific explanation would of course be that all small frogs falling from the sky in Europe, come from that center of frogeity.

To start with, I'd like to emphasize something that I am permitted to see because I am still primitive or intelligent or in a state of maladjustment:

That there is not one report findable of a fall of tadpoles from the sky.

As to "there in the first place":

See Leisure Hours, 3-779, for accounts of small frogs, or toads, said to have been seen to fall from the sky. The writer says that all observers were mistaken: that the frogs or toads must have fallen from trees or other places overhead.

Tremendous number of little toads, one or two months old, that were seen to fall from a great thick cloud that appeared suddenly in a sky that had been cloudless, August, 1804, near Toulouse, France, according to a letter from Prof. Pontus to M. Arrago. (Comptes Rendus, 3-54.)

Many instances of frogs that were seen to fall from the sky. ("Notes and Queries," 8-6-104); accounts of such falls, signed by witnesses. ("Notes and Queries," 8-6-190.)

Scientific American, July 12, 1873:

"A shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance is the reported result of a recent rainstorm at Kansas City, Mo."

As to having been there "in the first place":

Little frogs found in London, after a heavy storm, July 30, 1838. (Notes and Queries, 8-7-437);

Little toads found in a desert, after a rainfall, (Notes and Queries, 8-8-493).

To start with I do not deny--positively--the conventional explanation of "up and down." I think that there may have been such occurrences. I omit many notes that I have upon indistinguishables. In the London Times, July 4, 1883, there is an account of a shower of twigs and leaves and tiny toads in a storm upon the slopes of the Apennines. These may have been the ejectamenta of a whirlwind. I add, however, that I have notes upon two other falls of tiny toads, in 1883, one in France and one in Tahiti; also of fish in Scotland. But in the phenomenon of the Apennines, the mixture seems to me to be typical of the products of a whirlwind. The other instances seem to me to be typical of--something like migration? Their great numbers and their homogeneity. Over and over in these annals of the damned occurs the datum of segregation. But a whirlwind is thought of as a condition of chaos--quasi-chaos: not final negativeness, of course--

Monthly Weather Review, July, 1881:

"A small pond in the track of the cloud was sucked dry, the water being carried over the adjoining fields together with a large quantity of soft mud, which was scattered over the ground for half a mile around."

It is so easy to say that small frogs that have fallen from the sky had been scooped up by a whirlwind; but here are the circumstances of a scoop; in the exclusionist-imagination there is no regard for mud, débris from the bottom of a pond, floating vegetation, loose things from the shores--but a precise picking out of frogs only. Of all instances I have that attribute the fall of small frogs or toads to whirlwinds, only one definitely identifies or places the whirlwind. Also, as has been said before, a pond going up would be quite as interesting as frogs coming down. Whirlwinds we read over and over--but where and what whirlwind? It seems to me that anybody who had lost a pond would be heard from. In Symons' Meteorological Magazine, 32-106, a fall of small frogs, near Birmingham, June 30, 1892, is attributed to a specific whirlwind--but not a word as to any special pond that had contributed. And something that strikes my attention here is that these frogs are described as almost white.

I'm afraid there is no escape for us: we shall have to give to civilization upon this earth--some new worlds.

Places with white frogs in them.

Upon several occasions we have had data of unknown things that have fallen from--somewhere. But something not to be overlooked is that if living things have landed alive upon this earth--in spite of all we think we know of the accelerative velocity of falling bodies--and have propagated--why the exotic becomes the indigenous, or from the strangest of places we'd expect the familiar. Or if hosts of living frogs have come here--from somewhere else--every living thing upon this earth may, ancestrally, have come from--somewhere else.

I find that I have another note upon a specific hurricane:

Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist., 1-3-185:

After one of the greatest hurricanes in the history of Ireland, some fish were found "as far as 15 yards from the edge of the lake."

Have another: this is a good one for the exclusionists:

Fall of fish in Paris: said that a neighboring pond had been blown dry. (Living Age, 52-186.) Date not given, but I have seen it recorded somewhere else.

The best-known fall of fishes from the sky is that which occurred at Mountain Ash, in the Valley of Abedare, Glamorganshire, Feb. 11, 1859.

The Editor of the Zoologist, 2-677, having published a report of a fall of fishes, writes: "I am continually receiving similar accounts of frogs and fishes." But, in all the volumes of the Zoologist, I can find only two reports of such falls. There is nothing to conclude other than that hosts of data have been lost because orthodoxy does not look favorably upon such reports. The Monthly Weather Review records several falls of fishes in the United States; but accounts of these reported occurrences are not findable in other American publications. Nevertheless, the treatment by the Zoologist of the fall reported from Mountain Ash is fair. First appears, in the issue of 1859-6493, a letter from the Rev. John Griffith, Vicar of Abedare, asserting that the fall had occurred, chiefly upon the property of Mr. Nixon, of Mountain Ash. Upon page 6540, Dr. Gray, of the British Museum, bristling with exclusionism, writes that some of these fishes, which had been sent to him alive, were "very young minnows." He says: "On reading the evidence, it seems to me most probably only a practical joke: that one of Mr. Nixon's employees had thrown a pailful of water upon another, who had thought fish in it had fallen from the sky"--had dipped up a pailful from a brook.

Those fishes--still alive--were exhibited at the Zoological Gardens, Regent's Park. The Editor says that one was a minnow and that the rest were sticklebacks.

He says that Dr. Gray's explanation is no doubt right.

But, upon page 6564, he publishes a letter from another correspondent, who apologizes for opposing so "high an authority as Dr. Gray," but says that he had obtained some of these fishes from persons who lived a considerable distance apart, or considerably out of range of the playful pail of water.

According to the Annual Register, 1859-14, the fishes themselves had fallen by pailfuls.

If these fishes were not upon the ground in the first place, we base our objections to the whirlwind explanation, upon two data:

That they fell in no such distribution as one could attribute to the discharge of a whirlwind, but upon a narrow strip of land: about 80 yards long and 12 yards wide--

The other datum is again the suggestion that at first seemed so incredible, but for which support is piling up, a suggestion of a stationary source overhead--

That ten minutes later another fall of fishes occurred upon this same narrow strip of land.

Even arguing that a whirlwind may stand still axially, it discharges tangentially. Wherever the fishes came from it does not seem thinkable that some could have fallen and that others could have whirled even a tenth of a minute, then falling directly after the first to fall. Because of these evil circumstances the best adaptation was to laugh the whole thing off and say that some one had soused some one else with a pailful of water, in which a few "very young minnows" had been caught up.

In the London Times, March 2, 1859, is a letter from Mr. Aaron Roberts, curate of St. Peter's, Carmathon. In this letter the fishes are said to have been about four inches long, but there is some question of species. I think, myself, that they were minnows and sticklebacks. Some persons, thinking them to be sea fishes, placed them in salt water, according to Mr. Roberts. "The effect is stated to have been almost instantaneous death." "Some were placed in fresh water. These seem to thrive well." As to narrow distribution, we are told that the fishes fell "in and about the premises of Mr. Nixon." "It was not observed at the time that any fish fell [82/83] in any other part of the neighborhood, save in the particular spot mentioned."

In the London Times, March 10, 1859, Vicar Griffith writes an account:

"The roofs of some houses were covered with them."

In this letter it is said that the largest fishes were five inches long, and that these did not survive the fall.

Report of the British Association, 1859-158:

"The evidence of the fall of fish on this occasion was very conclusive. A specimen of the fish was exhibited and was found to be the Gasterosteus leuris.

Gasterosteus is the stickleback.

Altogether I think we have not a sense of total perdition, when we're damned with the explanation that some one soused some one else with a pailful of water, in which were thousands of fishes four or five inches long, some of which covered roofs of houses, and some of which remained ten minutes in the air. By way of contrast we offer our own acceptance.

That the bottom of a super-geographical pond had dropped out.

I have a great many notes upon the fall of fishes, despite the difficulty these records have in getting themselves published, but I pick out instances that especially relate to our super-geographical acceptances, or to the Principles of Super-Geography: or data of things that have been in the air longer than acceptably could a whirlwind carry them; that have fallen with a distribution narrower than is attributable to a whirlwind; that have fallen for a considerable length of time upon the same narrow area of land.

These three factors indicate, somewhere not far aloft, a region of inertness to this earth's gravitation, of course, however, a region that, by the flux and variation of all things, must at times be susceptible--but, afterward, our heresy will bifurcate--

In amiable accommodation to the crucifixion it'll get, I think--

But so impressed are we with the datum that, though there have been many reports of small frogs that have fallen from the sky, not one report upon a fall of tadpoles is findable, that to these circumstances another adjustment must be made.

Apart from our three factors of indication, an extraordinary observation is the fall of living things without injury to them. The devotees of St. Isaac explain that they fall upon thick grass and so survive: but Sir James Emerson Tennent, in his "History of Ceylon," tells of a fall of fishes upon gravel, by which they were seemingly uninjured. Something else apart from our three main interests is a phenomenon that looks like what one might call an alternating series of falls of fishes, whatever the significance may be:

Meerut, India, July, 1824 (Living Age, 52-186); Fifeshire, Scotland, summer of 1824 (Wernerian Nat. Hist. Soc. Trans., 5-575); Moradabad, India, July, 1826 (Living Age, 52-186); Ross-shire, Scotland, 1828 (Living Age, 52-186); Moradabad, India, July 20, 1829 (Lin. Soc. Trans., 16-764); Perthshire, Scotland (Living Age, 52-186); Argyleshire, Scotland, 1830, March 9, 1830 (Recreative Science, 3-329); Feridpoor, India, Feb. 19, 1830 (Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, 2-650).

A psycho-tropism that arises here--disregarding serial significance--or mechanical, unintelligent, repulsive reflex--is that the fishes of India did not fall from the sky; that they were found upon the ground after torrential rains, because streams had overflowed and had then receded.

In the region of Inertness that we think we can conceive of, or a zone that is to this earth's gravitation very much like the neutral zone of a magnet's attraction, we accept that there are bodies of water and also clear spaces--bottoms of ponds dropping out--very interesting ponds, having no earth at bottom--vast drops of water afloat in what is called space--fishes and deluges of water falling--

But also other areas, in which fishes--however they got there: a matter that we'll consider--remain and dry, or even putrefy, then sometimes falling by atmospheric dislodgment.

After a "tremendous deluge of rain, one of the heaviest falls on record" (All the Year Round, 8-255) at Rajkote, India, July 25, 1850, "the ground was literally covered with fishes."

The word "found" is agreeable to the repulsions of the conventionalists and their concept of an overflowing stream--but, according to Dr. Buist, some of these fishes were "found" on the tops of haystacks.

Ferrel (A Popular Treatise, p. 414) tells of a fall of living fishes some of them having been placed in a tank, where they survived--that occurred in India, about 20 miles south of Calcutta, Sept. 20, 1839. A witness of this fall says:

"The most strange thing which ever struck me was that the fish did not fall helter-skelter, or here and there, but they fell in a straight line, not more than a cubit in breadth." See Living Age, 52-186.

Amer. Jour. Sci., 1-32-199:

That, according to testimony taken before a magistrate, a fall occurred, Feb. 19, 1830, near Feridpoor, India, of many fishes, of various sizes--some whole and fresh and others "mutilated and putrefying." Our reflex to those who would say that, in the climate of India, it would not take long for fishes to putrefy, is--that high in the air, the climate of India is not torrid. Another peculiarity of this fall is that some of the fishes were much larger than others. Or to those who hold out for segregation in a whirlwind, or that objects, say, twice as heavy as others would be separated from the lighter, we point out that some of these fishes were twice as heavy as others.

In the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 2-650, depositions of witnesses are given:

"Some of these fish were fresh, but others rotten and without heads."

"Among the number which I had got, five were fresh and the rest stinking and headless."

They remind us of His Grace's observation of some pages back.

According to Dr. Buist, some of these fishes weighed one and a half pounds each and others three pounds.

A fall of fishes at Futtepoor, India, May 16, 1833:

"They were all dead and dry." (Dr. Buist, Living Age, 52-186.)

India is far away: about 1830 was long ago:

Nature, Sept. 19. 1918-46:

A correspondent writes, from the Dove Marine Laboratory, Cuttercoats, England, that, at Hindon, a suburb of Sunderland, Aug. 24, 1918, hundreds of small fishes, identified as sand eels, had fallen--

Again the small area: about 60 by 30 yards.

The fall occurred during a heavy rain that was accompanied by thunder--or indications of disturbance aloft--but by no visible lightning. The sea is close to Hindon, but if you try to think of these fishes having described a trajectory in a whirlwind from the ocean, consider this remarkable datum:

That, according to witnesses, the fall upon this small area, occupied ten minutes.

I cannot think of a clearer indication of a direct fall from a stationary source.

And:

"The fish were all dead, and indeed stiff and hard, when picked up, immediately after the occurrence."

By all of which I mean that we have only begun to pile up our data of things that fall from a stationary source overhead: we'll have to take up the subject from many approaches before our acceptance, which seems quite as rigorously arrived at as ever has been a belief, can emerge from the accursed.

I don't know how much the horse and barn will help us to emerge: but, if ever anything did go up from this earth's surface and stay up--those damned things--may have:

Monthly Weather Review, May, 1878:

In a tornado, in Wisconsin, May 23, 1878, "a barn and horse were carried completely away, and neither horse nor barn, nor any portion of either have since been found."

After that, which would be a little strong were it not for a steady improvement in our digestions that I note as we go along, there is little of the bizarre or the unassimilable, in the turtle that hovered six months or so over a small town in Mississippi:

Monthly Weather Review, May, 1894:

That, May 11, 1894, at Vicksburg, Miss., fell a small piece of alabaster; that, at Bovina, eight miles from Vicksburg, fell a gopher turtle.

They fell in a hailstorm.

This item was widely copied at the time: for instance, Nature, one of the volumes of 1894, page 430, and Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 20-273. As to discussion--not a word. Or Science and its continuity with Presbyterianism--data like this are damned at birth. The Weather Review does sprinkle, or baptize, or attempt to save, this infant--but in all the meteorological literature that I have gone through, after that date--not a word, except mention once or twice. The Editor of the Review says:

"An examination of the weather map show that these hailstorms occur on the south side of a region of cold northerly winds, and were but a small part of a series of similar storms: apparently some special local whirls or gusts carried heavy objects from this earth's surface up to the cloud regions."

Of all the incredibilities that we have to choose from, I give first place to a notion of a whirlwind pouncing upon a region and scrupulously selecting a turtle and a piece of alabaster. This time, the other mechanical thing `there in the first place' can not rise in response to its stimulus: it is resisted in that these objects were coated with ice--month of May in a southern state. If a whirlwind at all, there must have been very limited selection: there is no record of the fall of other objects. But there is no attempt in the Review to specify a whirlwind.

These strangely associated things were remarkably separated.

They fell eight miles apart.

Then--as if there were real reasoning--they must have been high to fall with such divergence, or one of them must have been carried partly horizontally eight miles farther than the other. But either supposition argues for power more than that of a local whirl or gust, or argues for a great, specific disturbance, of which there is no record--for the month of May, 1894.

Nevertheless--as if I really were reasonable--I do feel that I have to accept that this turtle had been raised from this earth's surface, somewhere near Vicksburg--because the gopher turtle is common in the southern states.

Then I think of a hurricane that occurred in the state of Mississippi weeks or months before May 11, 1894.

No--I don't look for it--and inevitably find it.

Or that things can go up so high in hurricanes that they stay up indefinitely--but may, after a while, be shaken down by storms. Over and over have we noted the occurrence of strange falls in storms. So then that the turtle and the piece of alabaster may have had far different origins--from different worlds, perhaps--have entered a region of suspension over this earth--wafting near each other--long duration--final precipitation by atmospheric disturbance--with hail--or that hailstones, too, when large, are phenomena of suspension of long duration: that it is highly unacceptable that the very large ones could become so great only in falling from the clouds.

Over and over has the note of disagreeableness, or of putrefaction, been struck--long duration. Other indications of long duration.

I think of a region somewhere above this earth's surface, in which gravitation is inoperative, and is not governed by the square of the distance--quite as magnetism is negligible at a very short distance from a magnet. Theoretically the attraction of a magnet should decrease with the square of the distance, but the falling-off is found to be almost abrupt at a short distance.

I think that things raised from this earth's surface to that region have been held there until shaken down by storms--

The Super-Sargasso Sea.

Derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets, things from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of Mars and Jupiter and Neptune; things raised by this earth's cyclones: horses and barns and elephants and flies and dodoes, moas, and pterodactyls; leaves from modern trees and leaves of the Carboniferous era--all, however, tending to disintegrate into homogeneous-looking muds or dusts, red or black or yellow--treasure-troves for the paleontologists and for the archaeologists--accumulations of centuries--cyclones of Egypt, Greece, and Assyria--fishes dried and hard, there a short time: others there long enough to putrefy--

But the omnipresence of Heterogeneity--or living fishes, also--ponds of fresh water: oceans of salt water.

As to the Law of Gravitation, I prefer to take one simple stand:

Orthodoxy accepts the correlation and equivalence of forces:

Gravitation is one of these forces.

All other forces have phenomena of repulsion and of inertness irrespective of distance, as well as of attraction.

But Newtonian Gravitation admits attraction only:

Then Newtonian Gravitation can be only one-third acceptable even to the orthodox, or there is denial of the correlation and equivalence of forces.

Or still simpler:

Here are the data.

Make what you will, yourself, of them.

In our Intermediatist revolt against homogeneous, or positive, explanations, or our acceptance that the all-sufficing cannot be less than universality, besides which, however, there would be nothing to suffice, our expression upon the Super-Sargasso Sea, though it harmonizes with data of fishes that fall as if from a stationary source--and, of course, with other data, too--is inadequate to account for two peculiarities of the falls of frogs:

That never has a fall of tadpoles been reported;

That never has a fall of full-grown frogs been reported--

Always frogs a few months old.

It sounds positive, but if there be such reports they are somewhere out of my range of reading.

But tadpoles would be more likely to fall from the sky, than would frogs, little or big, if such falls be attributed to whirlwinds; and more likely to fall from the Super-Sargasso Sea, if, though very tentatively and provisionally, we accept the Super-Sargasso Sea.

Before we taken up an especial expression upon the fall of immature and larval forms of life to this earth, and the necessity then of conceiving of some factor besides mere stationariness or suspension or stagnation, there are other data that are similar to data of falls of fishes.

Science Gossip, 1886-238:

That small snails, of a land species, had fallen near Redruth, Cornwall, July 8, 1886, during "a heavy thunderstorm:" roads and fields strewn with them, so that they were gathered up by the hatful: none seen to fall by the writer of this account: snails said to be "quite different to any previously observed in this district."

But, upon page 282, we have better orthodoxy. Another correspondent writes that he had heard of the supposed fall of snails: that he had supposed that all such stories had gone the way of witch stories; that, to his astonishment, he had read an account of this absurd story in a local newspaper of "great and deserved repute."

"I thought I should for once like to trace the origin of one of these fabulous tales."

Our own acceptance is that justice can not be in an intermediate existence, in which there can be approximation only to justice or to injustice; that to be fair is to have no opinion at all; that to be honest is to be uninterested; that to investigate is to admit prejudice; that nobody has ever really investigated anything, but has always sought positively to prove or disprove something that was conceived of, or suspected, in advance.

"As I suspected," says the correspondent, "I found that the snails were of a familiar land-species"--that they had been upon the ground "in the first place."

He found that the snails had appeared after the rain: that "astonished rustics had jumped to the conclusion that they had fallen."

He met one person who said that he had seen the snails fall.

"This was his error," says the investigator.

In the Philosophical Magazine, 58-310, there is an account of snails said to have fallen at Bristol, in a field of three acres, in such quantities that they were shovelled up. It is said that the snails "may be considered as a local species." Upon page 457, another correspondent says that the numbers had been exaggerated, and that in his opinion they had not been upon the ground in the first place. [89/90] But that there had been some unusual condition aloft comes out in his observation upon "the curious azure-blue appearance of the sun, at the time."

Nature, 47-278:

That, according to Das Wetter, (Dec., 1892), upon August 9, 1892, a yellow cloud appeared over Paderborn, Germany. From this cloud, fell a torrential rain, in which were hundreds of mussels. There is no mention of whatever may have been upon the ground in the first place, nor of a whirlwind.

Lizards--said to have fallen on the sidewalks of Montreal, Canada, Dec. 28, 1857. (Notes and Queries, 8-6-104.)

In the Scientific American, 3-112, a correspondent writes, from South Granville, N. Y., that, during a heavy shower, July 3, 1860, he heard a peculiar sound at his feet, and looking down, saw a snake lying as if stunned by a fall. It then came to life. Gray snake, about a foot long.

These data have any meaning or lack of meaning or degree of damnation you please: but, in the matter of the fall that occurred at Memphis, Tennessee, occur some strong significances. Our quasi-reasoning upon this subject applies to all segregations so far considered.

Monthly Weather Review, Jan. 15, 1877:

That, in Memphis, Tenn., Jan. 15, 1877, rather strictly localized, or "in a space of two blocks," and after a violent storm in which rain "fell in torrents," snakes were found. They were crawling on sidewalks, in yards, and in streets, and in masses--but "none were found on roofs or any elevation above ground" and "none were seen to fall."

If you prefer to believe that the snakes had always been there, or had been upon the ground in the first place, and that it was only that something occurred to call special attention to them, in the streets of Memphis, Jan. 15, 1877--why, that's sensible: that's the common sense that has been against us from the first.

It is not said whether the snakes were of a known species or not, but that "when first seen, they were of a dark brown, almost black." Blacksnakes, I suppose.

If we accept that these snakes did fall, even though not seen to fall by all the persons who were out sight-seeing in a violent storm, and had not been in the streets crawling loose or in thick tangled masses, in the first place;

If we try to accept that these snakes had been raised from some other part of this earth's surface in a whirlwind;

If we try to accept that a whirlwind could segregate them--

We accept the segregation of other objects raised in that whirlwind.

Then, near the point of origin, there would have been a fall of heavier objects that had been snatched up with the snakes--stones, fence rails, limbs of trees. Say that the snakes occupied the next gradation, and would be next to fall. Still farther would there have been separate falls of lightest objects: leaves twigs, tufts of grass.

In the Monthly Weather Review there is no mention of other falls said to have occurred anywhere in January, 1877.

Again ours is the objection against such selectiveness by a whirlwind. Conceivably a whirlwind could scoop out a den of hibernating snakes, with stones and earth and an infinitude of other débris, snatching up dozens of snakes--I don't know how many to a den--hundreds may be--but, according to the account of this occurrence in the New York Times, there were thousands of them; alive; from one foot to eighteen inches in length. The Scientific American, 36-86, records the fall, and says that there were thousands of them. The usual whirlwind-explanation is given--"but in what locality snakes exist in such abundance is yet a mystery."

This matter of enormousness of numbers suggests to me something of a migratory nature--but that snakes in the United States do not migrate in the month of January, if ever.

As to falls or flutterings of winged insects from the sky, prevailing notions of swarming would seem explanatory enough: nevertheless, in instances of ants, there are some peculiar circumstances.

L'Astronomie, 1889-353:

Falls 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, 31-193.) 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 24, 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 snow storm.

In Timb's Year Book, 1877-26, it is said that, in the winter of 1876, at Christiana, Norway, worms were found crawling upon the ground. The occurrence is considered a great mystery, because the worms could not have come up from the ground, inasmuch as the ground was frozen at the time, and because they were reported from other places, also, in Norway.

Immense numbers of black insects in a snowstorm, in 1827, at Pakroff, Russia (Scientific American, 30-193).

Fall, with snow, at Orenburg, Russia, Dec. 14, 1830, of a multitude of small, black insects, said to have been gnats, but also said to have had flea-like motions. (Amer. Jour. Sci., 1-22-375.)

Large number of worms found in a snowstorm, upon the surface of snow about four inches thick, near Sangerfield, N. Y., Nov. 18, 1850 (Scientific American, 6-96). The writer thinks that the worms [92/93] had been brought to the surface of the ground by rain, which had fallen previously.

Scientific American, Feb. 21, 1891:

"A puzzling phenomenon has been noticed frequently in some parts of Valley Bend District, Randolph County, Va., this winter. The crust of the snow has been covered two or three times with worms resembling the ordinary cut worms. Where they come from, unless they fall with the snow is inexplicable." In the Scientific American, Mar. 7, 1891, the Editor says that similar worms had been seen upon the snow near Utica, N. Y., and in Oneida and Herkimer Counties; that some of the worms had been sent to the Department of Agriculture at Washington. Again two species, or polymorphism. According to Prof. Riley, it was not polymorphism, "but two distinct species"--which, because of our data, we doubt. One kind was larger than the other: color-differences not distinctly stated. One is called the larvae of the common soldier beetle and the other "seems to be a variety of the bronze cut worm." No attempt to explain the occurrence in snow.

Fall of great numbers of larvae of beetles, near Mortagne, France, May, 1858. The larvae were inanimate as if with cold. (Annales Society Entomologique de France, 1858.)

Trans. Ent. Soc. of London, 1871-183, records "snowing of larvae," in Silesia, 1806; "appearance of many larvae on the snow," in Saxony, 1811; "larvae found alive on the snow," 1828; larvae and snow which "fell together," in the Eifel, Jan. 30, 1847; "fall of insects," Jan. 24, 1849, in Lithuania; occurrence of larvae estimated at 300,000 on the snow in Switzerland, in 1856. The compiler says that most of these larvae live underground, or at the roots of trees; that whirlwinds uproot trees, and carry away the larvae--conceiving of them as not held in masses of frozen earth--all as neatly detachable as currants in something. In the Revue et Magasin de Zoologie, 1849-72, there is an account of the fall in Lithuania, Jan. 24, 1849--that black larvae had fallen in enormous numbers.

Larvae thought to have been of beetles, but described as "caterpillars," not seen to fall, but found crawling on the snow, after a snowstorm, at Warsaw, Jan. 20, 1850. (All the Year Round, 8-253.)

Flammarion (The Atmosphere, p. 414) tells of a fall of larvae that occurred Jan. 30, 1869, in a snowstorm, in Upper Savoy: "They could not have been hatched in the neighborhood, for, during [93/94] the days preceding, the temperature had been very low"; said to have been a species common in the south of France. In La Science Pour Tous, 14-183, it is said that with these larvae there were developed insects.

L'Astronomie, 1890-313:

That, upon the last of January, 1890, there fell, in a great tempest, in Switzerland, incalculable numbers of larvae: some black and some yellow; numbers so great that hosts of birds were attracted.

Altogether we regard this as one of our neatest expressions for external origins and against the whirlwind-explanation. If an exclusionist says that, in January, larvae were precisely and painstakingly picked out of frozen ground, in incalculable numbers, he thinks of a tremendous force--disregarding its refinements: then if origin and precipitation be not far apart, what becomes of an infinitude of other débris, conceiving of no time for segregation?

If he thinks of a long translation--all the way from the south of France to Upper Savoy, he may think then of a very fine sorting over by differences of specific gravity--but in such a fine selection, larvae would be separated from developed insects.

As to differences in specific gravity--the yellow larvae that fell in Switzerland, Jan., 1890, were three times the size of the black larvae that fell with them. In accounts of this occurrence, there is no denial of the fall.

Or that a whirlwind never brought them together and held them together and precipitated them and only them together--

That they came from Genesistrine.

There's no escape from it. We'll be persecuted for it. Take it or leave it--

Genesistrine.

The notion is that there is somewhere aloft a place of origin of life relatively to this earth. Whether it's the planet Genesistrine, or the moon, or a vast amorphous region super-jacent to this earth, or an island in the Super-Sargasso Sea, should perhaps be left to the researches of other super--or extra--geographers. That the first unicellular organisms may have come here from Genesistrine--or that men or anthropomorphic beings may have come here before amoebae: that, upon Genesistrine, there may have been an evolution expressible in conventional biologic terms, but that evolution upon this earth has been--like evolution in modern Japan--induced by external influences; that evolution, as a whole, upon this earth, has been a process of population by immigration or by bombardment. Some notes I have upon remains of men and animals encysted, or covered with clay or stone, as if fired here as projectiles, I omit now, because it seems best to regard the whole phenomenon as a tropism--as a geotropism--probably atavistic, or vestigial, as it were, or something still continuing long after expiration of necessity; that, once upon a time, all kinds of things came here from Genesistrine, but that now only a few kinds of bugs and things, at long intervals, feel the inspiration.

Not one instance have we of tadpoles that have fallen to this earth. It seems reasonable that a whirlwind could scoop up a pond, frogs and all and cast down the frogs somewhere else: but, then, more reasonable that a whirlwind could scoop up a pond, tadpoles and all--because tadpoles are more numerous in their season than are frogs in theirs: but the tadpole-season is earlier in the spring, or in a time that is more tempestuous. Thinking in terms of causation--as if there were real causes--our notion is that, if X is likely to cause Y, but is more likely to cause Z, but does not cause Z, X is not the cause of Y. Upon this quasi-sorites, we base our acceptance that the little frogs that have fallen to this earth are not products of whirlwinds: that they come from externality, or from Genesistrine.

I think of Genesistrine in terms of biologic mechanics: not that somewhere there are persons who collect bugs in or about the last of January and frogs in July and August, and bombard this earth, any more than do persons go through northern regions, catching and collecting birds, every autumn, then casting them southward.

But atavistic, or vestigial, geotropism in Genesistrine--or a million larvae start crawling, and a million little frogs start hopping--knowing no more what it's all about than we do when we crawl to work in the morning and hop away at night.

I should say, myself, that Genesistrine is a region in the Super-Sargasso Sea, and that parts of the Super-Sargasso Sea have rhythms of susceptibility to the earth's attraction.

Book of the Damned Chapter VIII

I ACCEPT that, when there are storms, the damdest of excluded, excommunicated things--things that are leprous to the faithful--are brought down--from the Super-Sargasso Sea--or from what for convenience we call the Super-Sargasso Sea--which by no means has been taken into full acceptance yet.

That things are brought down by storms, just as, from the depths of the sea things are brought up by storms. To be sure it is orthodoxy that storms have little, if any, effect below waves of the ocean--but--of course--only to have an opinion is to be ignorant of, or to disregard a contradiction, or something else that modifies an opinion out of distinguishability.

Symons' Meteorological Magazine, 47-180:

That, along the coast of New Zealand, in regions not subject to submarine volcanic action, deep-sea fishes are often brought up by storms.

Iron and stones that fall from the sky; and atmospheric disturbances:

"There is absolutely no connection between the two phenomena." (Symons.)

The orthodox belief is that objects moving at planetary velocity would, upon entering this earth's atmosphere, be virtually unaffected by hurricanes; might as well think of a bullet swerved by someone fanning himself. The only trouble with the orthodox reasoning is the usual trouble--its phantom-dominant--its basing upon a myth--data we've had, and more we'll have, of things in the sky having no independent velocity.

There are so many storms and so many meteors and meteorites that it would be extraordinary if there were no concurrences. Nevertheless so many of these concurrences are listed by Prof. Baden-Powell (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1850-54) that one--notices.

See Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860--other instances.

The famous fall of stones at Siena, Italy, 1794--"in a violent storm."

See Greg's Catalogues--many instances. One that stands out is--"bright ball of fire and light in a hurricane in England, Sept. 2, 1786." The remarkable datum here is that this phenomenon was visible forty minutes. That's about 800 times the duration that the orthodox give to meteors and meteorites.

See the Annual Register--many instances.

In Nature, Oct. 25, 1877, and the London Times, Oct. 15, 1877, something that fell in a gale on Oct. 14, 1877, is described as a "huge ball of green fire." This phenomenon is described by another correspondent, in Nature, 17-10, and an account of it by another correspondent was forwarded to Nature by W.F. Denning.

There are so many instances that some of us will revolt against the insistence of the faithful that it is only coincidence, and accept that there is connection of the kind called causal. If it is too difficult to think of stones and metallic masses swerved from their courses by storms, if they move at high velocity, we think of low velocity, or of things having no velocity at all, hovering a few miles above this earth, dislodged by storms, and falling luminously.

But the resistance is so great here, and "coincidence" so insisted upon that we'd better have some more instances:

Aerolite in a storm at St. Leonards-on-sea, England, Sept. 17, 1885--no trace of it found (Annual Register, 1885); meteorite in a gale, March 1, 1886, described in the Monthly Weather Review, March 1886; meteorite in a thunderstorm, off coast of Greece, Nov. 19, 1899, (Nature, 61-111); fall of a meteorite in a storm, July 7, 1883, near Lachine, Quebec (Monthly Weather Review, July 1883); same phenomenon noted in Nature, 28-319; meteorite in a whirlwind, Sweden, Sept. 24, 1883, (Nature, 29-15).

London Roy. Soc. Proc., 6-276

A triangular cloud that appeared in a storm, Dec. 17, 1852; a red nucleus, about half the apparent diameter of the moon, and a long tail; visible thirteen minutes; explosion of the nucleus.

Nevertheless, in Science Gossip, 6-65, it is said that, though meteorites have fallen in storms, no connection is supposed to exist between the two phenomena, except by the

ignorant peasantry.

But some of us peasants have gone through the Report of the British Association, 1852. Upon page 239, Dr. Buist, who had never heard of the Super-Sargasso Sea, says that, though it is difficult to trace connection between the phenomena, three aerolites had fallen in five months, in India, during thunderstorms, in 1851 (may have been 1852). For accounts by witnesses, see page 229 of the Report.

Or--we are on our way to account for "thunderstones."

It seems to me that, very striking here, is borne out the general acceptance that ours is only an intermediate existence, in which there is nothing fundamental, or nothing final to take as a positive standard to judge by.

Peasants believed in meteorites.

Scientists excluded meteorites.

Peasants believe in "thunderstones."

Scientists exclude "thunderstones."

It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields, and that scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms. We can not take for a real base that, as to phenomena with which they are more familiar, peasants are more likely to be right than are scientists: a host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against us.

I should say that our "existence" is like a bridge--except that that comparison is in static terms--but like the Brooklyn Bridge, upon which multitudes of bugs are seeking a fundamental--coming to a girder that seems firm and final--but the girder is built upon supports. A support then seems final. But it is built upon underlying structures. Nothing final can be found in all the bridge, because the bridge itself is not a final thing in itself, but is a relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn. If our "existence" is a relationship between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute, the quest for finality in it is hopeless: everything in it must be relative, if the "whole" is not a whole, but is, itself, a relation.

In the attitude of Acceptance, our pseudo-base is:

Cells of an embryo are in the reptilian era of the embryo;

Some cells feel stimuli to take on new appearances.

If it be of the design of the whole that the next era be mammalian, those cells that turn mammalian will be sustained against resistance, by inertia, of all the rest, and will be relatively right, though not finally right, because they, too, in time will have to give way to characters of other eras of higher development.

If we are upon the verge of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown, it will avail thee not to call us base-born and frowsy peasants.

In our crude, bucolic way, we now offer an outrage upon common sense that we think will some day be an unquestioned commonplace:

That manufactured objects of stone and iron have fallen from the sky:

That they have been brought down from a state of suspension, in a region of inertness to this earth's attraction, by atmospheric disturbances.

The "thunderstone" is usually "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone," says a writer in the Cornhill Magazine, 50-517. It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. Of course this writer says it's all superstition. Otherwise he'd be one of us crude and simple sons of the soil.

Conventional damnation is that stone implements, already on the ground--"on the ground in the first place"--are found near where lightning was seen to strike: that are supposed by astonished rustics, or by intelligence of a low order, to have fallen in or with lightning.

Throughout this book, we class a great deal of science with bad fiction. When is fiction bad, cheap, low? If coincidence is overworked. That's one way of deciding. But with single writers coincidence seldom is overworked: we find the excess in the subject at large. Such a writer as the one of the Cornhill Magazine tells us vaguely of beliefs of peasants: there is no massing of instance after instance after instance. Here ours will be the method of mass-formation.

Conceivably lightning may strike the ground near where there was a wedge-shaped object in the first place: again and again and again: lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in China; lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in Scotland; lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in Central Africa: coincidence in France; coincidence in Java; coincidence in South America--

We grant a great deal but note a tendency to restlessness. Nevertheless this is the psycho-tropism of science to all "thunderstones" said to have fallen luminously.

As to greenstone, it is in the island of Jamaica, where the notion is general that axes of a hard greenstone fall from the sky--"during the rains." (Jour. Inst. Jamaica, 2-4.) Some other time we shall inquire into this localization of objects of a specific material. "They are of a stone nowhere else to be found in Jamaica." (Notes and Queries, 2-8-24.)

In my own tendency to exclude, or in the attitude of one peasant or savage who thinks he is not to be classed with other peasants or savages, I am not very much impressed with what natives think. It would be hard to tell why. If the word of a Lord Kelvin carries no more weight, upon scientific subjects, than the word of a Sitting Bull, unless it be in agreement with conventional opinion--I think it must be because savages have bad table manners. However, my snobbishness, in this respect, loosens up somewhat before very widespread belief by savages and peasants. And the notion of "thunderstones" is as wide as geography itself.

The natives of Burmah, China, Japan, according to Blinkenberg (Thunder Weapons, p. 100)--not, of course, that Blinkenberg accepts one word of it--think that carved stone objects have fallen from the sky, because they think they have seen such objects fall from the sky. Such objects are called "thunderbolts" in these countries. They are called "thunderstones" in Moravia, Holland, Belgium, France, Cambodia, Sumatra, and Siberia. They're called "storm stones" in Lausitz; "sky arrows" in Slavonia; "thunder axes" in England and Scotland; "lightning stones" in Spain and Portugal; "sky axes" in Greece; "lightning flashes" in Brazil; "thunder teeth" in Amboina.

The belief is as widespread as is belief in ghosts and witches, which only the superstitious deny to-day.

As to beliefs by North American Indians, Tyler gives a list of references (Primitive Culture, 2-237). As to South American Indians--"Certain stone hatchets are said to have fallen from the heavens." (Jour. Amer. Folk Lore, 17-203.)

If you, too, revolt against coincidence after coincidence after coincidence, but find our interpretation of "thunderstones" just a little too strong or rich for digestion, we recommend the explanation of one, Tallius, written in 1649:

"The naturalists say they are generated in the sky by fulgureous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumfixed humor."

Of course the paper in the Cornhill Magazine was written with no intention of trying really to investigate this subject, but to deride the notion that worked-stone objects have ever fallen from the sky. A writer in the Amer. Jour. Sci., 1-21-325, read this paper and thinks it remarkable "that any man of ordinary reasoning powers should write a paper to prove that thunderbolts do not exist."

I confess that we're a little flattered by that.

Over and over:

"It is scarcely necessary to suggest to the intelligent reader that thunderstones are a myth."

We contend that there is a misuse of a word here: we admit that only we are intelligent upon this subject, if by intelligence is meant the inquiry of inequilibrium, and that all other intellection is only mechanical reflex--of course that intelligence, too, is mechanical, but less orderly and confined: less obviously mechanical--that as an acceptance of ours becomes firmer and firmer-established, we pass from the state of intelligence to reflexes in ruts. An odd thing is that intelligence is usually supposed to be creditable. It may be in the sense that it is mental activity trying to find out, but it is confession of ignorance. The bees, the theologians, the dogmatic scientists are the intellectual aristocrats. The rest of us are plebians, not yet graduated to Nirvana, or to the instinctive and suave as differentiated from the intelligent and crude.

Blinkenberg gives many instances of the superstition of "thunderstones" which flourishes only where mentality is in a lamentable state--or universally. In Malacca, Sumatra, and Java, natives say that stone axes have often been found under trees that have been struck by lightning. Blinkenberg does not dispute this, but says it is coincidence: that the axes were of course upon the ground in the first place: that the natives jumped to the conclusion that these carved stones had fallen in or with lightning. In Central Africa, it is said that often have wedge-shaped, highly polished objects of stone, described as "axes," been found sticking in trees that have been struck by lightning--or by what seemed to be lightning. The natives, rather like the unscientific persons of Memphis, Tenn., when they saw snakes after a storm, jumped to the conclusion that the "axes" had not always been sticking in the trees. Livingstone (Last Journals, pages 83, 89, 442, 448) says that he has never heard of stone implements used by natives of Africa. A writer in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1877-308, says that there are a few.

That they are said, by the natives, to have fallen in thunderstorms.

As to luminosity, it is my lamentable acceptance that bodies falling through this earth's atmosphere, if not warmed even, often fall with a brilliant light, looking like flashes of lightning. This matter seems important: we'll take it up later, with data.

In Prussia, two stone axes were found in the trunks of trees, one under the bark. (Blinkenberg, Thunder Weapons, p. 100).

The finders jumped to the conclusion that the axes had fallen there.

Another stone ax--or wedge-shaped object of worked stone--said to have been found in a tree that had been struck by something that looked like lightning. (Thunder Weapons, p. 71.)

The finder jumped to the conclusion.

Story told by Blinkenberg of a woman, who lived near Kulsbjaergene, Sweden, who found a flint near an old willow--"near her house." I emphasize "near her house" because that means familiar ground. The willow had been split by something.

She jumped.

Cow killed by lightning, or by what looked like lightning, (Isle of Sark, near Guernsey). The peasant who owned the cow dug up the ground at the spot and found a small greenstone "ax." Blinkenberg says that he jumped to the conclusion that it was this object that had fallen luminously, killing the cow.

Reliquary, 1867-207:

A flint ax found by a farmer, after a severe storm--described as a "fearful storm"--by a signal staff, which had been split by something. I should say that nearness to a signal staff may be considered familiar ground.

Whether he jumped, or arrived at the conclusion by a more leisurely process, the farmer thought that the flint object had fallen in the storm.

In this instance we have a lamentable scientist with us. It's impossible to have positive difference between orthodoxy and heresy: somewhere there must be a merging into each other, or an overlapping. Nevertheless, upon such a subject as this, it does seem a little shocking. In most important works upon meteorites, the peculiar, sulphurous odor of things that fall from the sky is mentioned. Sir John Evans ("Stone Implements," p. 57) says--with extraordinary reasoning powers, if he could never have thought such a thing with ordinary reasoning powers--that this flint object "proved to have been the bolt, by its peculiar smell when broken."

If it did so prove to be, that settles the whole subject. If we prove that only one object of worked stone has fallen from the sky, all piling up of further reports is unnecessary. However, we have already taken the stand that nothing settles anything; that the disputes of ancient Greece are no nearer solution now than they were several thousand years ago--all because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to prove or solve or settle. Our object is to be more nearly real than our opponents. Wideness is an aspect of the Universal. We go on widely. According to us the fat man is nearer godliness than is the thin man. Eat, drink, and approximate to the Positive Absolute. Beware of negativeness, by which we mean indigestion.

The vast majority of "thunderstones" are described as "axes," but Meunier (La Nature, 1892-2-381) tells of one that was in his possession; said to have fallen at Ghardia, Algeria, contrasting "profoundment" (pear-shaped) with the angular outlines of ordinary meteorites. The conventional explanation that it had been formed as a drop of molten matter from a larger body seems reasonable to me; but with less agreeableness I note its fall in a thunderstorm, the datum that turns the orthodox meteorologist pale with rage, or induces a slight elevation of his eyebrows, if you mention it to him.

Meunier tells of another "thunderstone" said to have fallen in North Africa. Meunier, too, is a little lamentable here: he quotes a soldier of experience that such objects fall most frequently in the deserts of Africa.

Rather miscellaneous now:

"Thunderstone" said to have fallen in London, April, 1876: weight about 8 pounds: no particulars as to shape (Timb's Year Book, 1877-246).

"Thunderbolt" said to have fallen at Cardiff, Sept. 26, 1916, (London Times, Sept. 28, 1916). According to Nature, 98-95, it was coincidence; only a lightning flash had been seen.

Stone that fell in a storm, near St. Albans, England: accepted at the Museum of St. Albans; said, at the British Museum, not to be of "true meteoritic material." (Nature, 80-34.)

London Times, April 26, 1876:

That, April 20, 1876, near Wolverhampton, fell a mass of meteoritic iron during a heavy fall of rain. An account of this phenomenon in Nature, 14-272, by H.S. Maskelyne, who accepts it as authentic. Also, see Nature, 13-531.

For three other instances, see the Scientific American, 47-194; 52-83; 68-325.

As to wedge-shaped larger than could very well be called an "ax":

Nature, 30-300:

That, May 27, 1884, at Tysnas, Norway, a meteorite had fallen: that the turf was torn up at the spot where the object had been supposed to have fallen; that two days later "a very peculiar stone" was found near by. The description is--"in shape and size very like the fourth part of a large Stilton cheese."

Description of the thunderstones of Burmah (Proc. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, 1869-183): said to be a kind of stone unlike any other found in Burmah; called "thunderbolts" by the natives. I think there's a good deal of meaning in such expressions as "unlike any other found in Burmah"--but that if they said anything more definite, there would have been unpleasant consequences to writers in the 19th century.

More about the thunderstones of Burmah, in the Proc. Soc. Antiq. of London, 2-3-97. One of them, described as an "adze," was exhibited by Captain Duff, who wrote that there was no stone like it in the neighborhood.

Of course it may not be very convincing to say that because a stone is unlike neighboring stones it had foreign origin--also we fear it is a kind of plagiarism: we got it from the geologists, who demonstrate by this reasoning the foreign origin of erratics. We fear we're a little gross and scientific at times.

But it's my acceptance that a great deal of scientific literature must be read between the lines. It's not everyone who has the lamentableness of a Sir John Evans. Just as a great deal of Voltaire's meaning was inter-linear, we suspect that a Captain Duff merely hints rather than to risk having a Prof. Lawrence Smith fly at him and call him "a half-insane man." Whatever Captain Duff's meaning may have been, and whether he smiled like a Voltaire when he wrote it, Captain Duff writes of "the extremely soft nature of the stone, rendering it equally useless as an offensive or defensive weapon."

Story, by a correspondent, in Nature, 34-53, of a Malay, of "considerable social standing"--and one thing about our data is that, damned though they be, they do so often bring us into awful good company--who knew of a tree that had been struck, about a month before, by something in a thunderstorm. He searched among the roots of this tree and found a "thunderstone." Not said whether [104/105] he jumped or leaped to the conclusion that it had fallen: process likely to be more leisurely in tropical countries. Also I'm afraid his way of reasoning was not very original: just so were fragments of the Bath-furnace meteorite, accepted by orthodoxy, discovered.

We shall now have an unusual experience. We shall read of some reports of extraordinary circumstances that were investigated by a man of science--not, of course that they were really investigated by him, but that his phenomena occupied a position approximating higher to real investigation than to utter neglect. Over and over we read of extraordinary occurrences--no discussion; not even a comment afterward findable; mere mention occasionally--burial and damnation.

The extraordinary and how quickly it is hidden away.

Burial and damnation, or the obscurity of the conspicuous.

We did read of a man who, in the matter of snails, did travel some distance to assure himself of something that he had suspected in advance; and we remember Prof. Hitchcock, who had only to smite Amherst with the wand of his botanical knowledge, and lo! two fungi sprang up before night; and we did read of Dr. Gray and his thousands of fishes from one pailful of water--but these instances stand out; more frequently there was no "investigation." We now have a good many reported occurrences that were "investigated." Of things said to have fallen from the sky, we make, in the usual scientific way, two divisions: miscellaneous objects and substances, and symmetric objects attributable to beings like human beings, sub-dividing into--wedges, spheres, and disks.

Jour. Royal Met. Soc., 14-207:

That, July 2, 1866, a correspondent to a London newspaper, wrote that something had fallen from the sky, during a thunderstorm of June 30, 1866, at Notting Hill. Mr. G.T. Symons, of Symons' Meteorological Magazine, investigated, about as fairly, and with about as unprejudiced a mind, as anything ever has been investigated.

He says that the object was nothing but a lump of coal: that, next door to the home of the correspondent coal had been unloaded the day before. With the uncanny wisdom of the stranger upon unfamiliar ground that we have noted before, Mr. Symons saw that the coal reported to have fallen from the sky, and the coal unloaded more prosaically the day before, were identical. Persons in the neighborhood, unable to make this simple identification, had bought from the correspondent pieces of the object reported to have fallen from the sky. As to credulity, I know of no limits for it--but when it comes to paying our money for credulity--oh, no standards to judge by, of course--just the same--

The trouble with efficiency is that it will merge away into excess. With what seems to me to be super-abundance of convincingness, Mr. Symons then lugs another character into his little comedy:

That it was all a hoax by a chemist's pupil, who had filled a capsule with an explosive, and "during the height of the storm had thrown the burning mass into the gutter, so making an artificial thunderbolt."

Or even Shakespeare, with all his inartistry, did not lug in King Lear to make Hamlet complete.

Whether I'm lugging in something that has no special meaning, myself, or not, I find that this storm of June 30, 1866, was peculiar. It is described in the London Times, July 2, 1866: that "during the storm, the sky, in many places remained partially clear while hail and rain were falling." That may have more meaning when we take up the possible extra-mundane origin of some hailstones, especially if they fall from a cloudless sky. Mere suggestion, not worth much, that there have been falls of extra-mundane substances, in London, June 30, 1866.

Clinkers, said to have fallen, during a storm, at Kilburn, July 5, 1877:

According to the Kilburn Times, July 7, 1877, quoted by Mr. Symons, a street had been "literally strewn," during the storm, with a mass of clinkers, estimated at about two bushels: sizes from that of a walnut to that of a man's hand--"Pieces of the clinker can be seen at the Kilburn Times office."

If these clinkers, or cinders, were refuse from one of the super-mercantile constructions from which coke and coal and ashes occasionally fall to this earth, or, rather, to the Super-Sargasso Sea, from which dislodgment by tempests occurs, it is intermediatistic to accept that they must merge away somewhere with local phenomena of the scene of precipitation. If a red-hot stove should drop from a cloud into Broadway, some one would find that at about the time of the occurrence, a moving van had passed, and that the moving men had tired of the stove, or something--that it had not been really red-hot, but had been rouged instead of blacked, by some absent-minded housekeeper. Compared with some of the scientific explanations that we have encountered, there's considerable restraint, I think, in that one.

Mr. Symons learned that in the same street--he emphasizes that it was a short street--there was a fire-engine station. I had such an impression of him hustling and bustling around at Notting Hill, searching cellars until he found one with newly arrived coal in it; ringing door bells, exciting a whole neighborhood, calling up to second-story windows, stopping people in the streets, hotter and hotter on the trail of a wretched imposter of a chemist's pupil. After his efficiency at Notting Hill, we'd expect to hear that he went to the station, and--something like this:

"It is said that clinkers fell, in your street, at about ten minutes past four o'clock, afternoon of July fifth. Will you look over your records and tell me where your engine was at about ten minutes past four, July fifth?"

Mr. Symons says:

"I think that most probably they had been raked out of the steam fire-engine."

June 20, 1880, it was reported that a "thunderbolt" had struck the house at 180 Oakley Street, Chelsea, falling down the chimney, into the kitchen grate.

Mr. Symons investigated.

He describes the "thunderbolt" as an "agglomeration of brick, soot, unburnt coal and cinder."

He says that, in his opinion, lightning had flashed down the chimney, and had fused some of the brick of it.

He does not think it remarkable that the lightning did not then scatter the contents of the grate, which were disturbed only as if a heavy body had fallen. If we admit that climbing up the chimney to find out, is too rigorous a requirement for a man who may have been large, dignified and subject to expansions, the only unreasonableness we find in what he says--as judged by our more modern outlook, is:

"I suppose that no one would suggest that bricks are manufactured in the atmosphere."

Sounds a little unreasonable to us, because it is so of the positivistic spirit of former times, when it was not so obvious that the highest incredibility and laughability must merge away with the "proper"--as the Sci. Am. Sup. would say. The preposterous is always interpretable in terms of the "proper," with which it must be continuous--or--clay-like masses such as have fallen from the sky--tremendous heat generated by their velocity--they bake--bricks.

We begin to suspect that Mr. Symons exhausted himself at Notting Hill. It's a warning to efficiency-fanatics.

Then the instance of three lumps of earthy matter, found upon a well-frequented path, after a thunderstorm, at Reading, July 3, 1883. There are so many records of the fall of earthy matter from the sky that it would seem almost uncanny to find resistance here, were we not so accustomed to the uncompromising stands of orthodoxy--which, in our metaphysics, represent good, as attempts, but evil in their insufficiency. If I thought it necessary, I'd list one hundred and fifty instances of earthy matter said to have fallen from the sky. It is his antagonism to atmospheric disturbance associated with the fall of things from the sky that blinds and hypnotizes a Mr. Symons here. This especial Mr. Symons rejects the Reading substance because it was not "of true meteoritic material." It's uncanny--or it's not uncanny at all, but universal--if you don't take something for a standard of opinion, you can't have any opinion at all: but, if you do take a standard, in some of its applications it must be preposterous. The carbonaceous meteorites, which are unquestioned--though avoided, as we have seen--by orthodoxy, are more glaringly of untrue meteoritic material than was this substance of Reading. Mr. Symons says that these three lumps were upon the ground "in the first place."

Whether these data are worth preserving or not, I think that the appeal that this especial Mr. Symons makes is worthy of a place in the museum we're writing. He argues against belief in all external origins "for our credit as Englishmen." He is a patriot, but I think that these foreigners had a small chance "in the first place" for hospitality from him.

Then comes a "small lump of iron (two inches in diameter)" said to have fallen, during a thunderstorm, at Brixton, Aug. 17, 1887. Mr. Symons says: "At present I can not trace it."

He was at his best at Notting Hill: there's been a marked falling off in his later manner:

In the London Times, Feb. 1, 1888, it is said that a roundish object of iron had been found, "after the violent thunderstorm," in a garden at Brixton, Aug. 17, 1887. It was analyzed by a chemist, who could not identify it as true meteoritic material. Whether a product of workmanship like human workmanship or not, this object is described as an oblate spheroid, about two inches across its major diameter. The chemist's name and address are given: Mr. J. James Morgan: Ebbw Vale.

Garden--familiar ground--I suppose that in Mr. Symons' opinion this symmetric object had been upon the ground "in the first place," though he neglects to say this. But we do note that he described this object as a "lump," which does not suggest the spheroidal or symmetric. It is our notion that the word "lump" was, because of its meaning of amorphousness, used purposely to have the next datum stand alone, remote, without similars. If Mr. Symons had said that there had been a report of another round object that had fallen from the sky, his readers would be attracted by an agreement. He distracts his readers by describing in terms of the unprecedented--

"Iron cannon ball."

It was found in a manure heap, in Sussex, after a thunderstorm.

However, Mr. Symons argues pretty reasonably, it seems to me, that, given a cannon ball in a manure heap, in the first place, lightning might be attracted by it, and, if seen to strike there, the untutored mind, or mentality below the average, would leap or jump, or proceed with less celerity, to the conclusion that the iron object had fallen.

Except that--if every farmer isn't upon very familiar ground--or if every farmer doesn't know his own manure heap as well as Mr. Symons knew his writing desk--

Then comes the instance of a man, his wife, and his three daughters, at Casterton, Westmoreland, who were looking out at their lawn, during a thunderstorm, when they "considered," as Mr. Symons expresses it, that they saw a stone fall from the sky, kill a sheep, and bury itself in the ground.

They dug.

They found a stone ball.

Symons:

Coincidence. It had been there in the first place.

This object was exhibited at a meeting of the Royal Meteorological Society by Mr. C. Carus-Wilson. It is described in the Journal's list of exhibits as a "sandstone" ball. It is described as "sandstone" by Mr. Symons.

Now a round piece of sandstone may be almost anywhere in the ground--in the first place--but, by our more or less discreditable habit of prying and snooping, we find that this object was rather more complex and of material less commonplace. In snooping through Knowledge, October 9, 1885, we read that this "thunder-stone" was in the possession of Mr. C. Carus-Wilson, who tells the story of the witness and his family--the sheep killed, the burial of something in the earth, the digging, and the finding. Mr. C. Carus-Wilson describes the object as a ball of hard, ferruginous quartzite, about the size of a cocoanut, weight about twelve pounds. Whether we're feeling around for significance or not, there is a suggestion not only of symmetry but of structure in this object: it had an external shell, separated from a loose nucleus. Mr. Carus-Wilson attributes this cleavage to unequal cooling of the mass.

My own notion is that there is very little deliberate misrepresentation in the writings of scientific men: that they are quite as guiltless in intent as are other hypnotic subjects. Such a victim of induced belief reads of a stone ball said to have fallen from the sky. Mechanically in his mind arise impressions of globular lumps, or nodules, of sandstone, which are common almost everywhere. He assimilates the reported fall with his impressions of objects in the ground, in the first place. To an intermediatist, the phenomena of intellection are only phenomena of universal process localized in human minds. The process called "explanation" is only a local aspect of universal assimilation. It looks like materialism: but the intermediatist holds that interpretation of the immaterial, as it is called, in terms of the material, as it is called, is no more rational than interpretation of the "material" in terms of the "immaterial": that there is a quasi-existence neither the material nor the immaterial, but approximations one way or the other. But so hypnotic quasi-reasons: that globular lumps of sandstone are common. Whether he jumps or leaps, or whether only the frowsy and baseborn are so athletic, his is the impression, by assimilation, that this especial object is a ball of sandstone. Or human mentality: its inhabitants are conveniences. It may be that Mr. Symons' paper was written before this object was exhibited to the members of the Society, and with the charity with which, for the sake of diversity, we intersperse our malices, we are willing to accept that he "investigated" something that he has never seen. But whoever listed this object was uncareful: it is listed as "sandstone."

We're making excuses for them.

Really--as it were--you know, we're not quite so damned as we were.

One does not apologize for the gods and at the same time feel quite utterly prostrate before them.

If this were a real existence, and all of us real persons, with real standards to judge by, I'm afraid we'd have to be a little severe with some of these Mr. Symonses. As it is, of course, seriousness seems out of place.

We note an amusing little touch in the indefinite allusion to "a man," who with his un-named family, had "considered" that he had seen a stone fall. The "man" was the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, who was well-known in his day.

The next instance was reported by W.B. Tripp, F.R.M.S.--that, during a thunderstorm, a farmer had seen the ground in front of him plowed up by something that was luminous.

Dug.

Bronze ax.

My own notion is that an expedition to the north pole could not be so urgent as that representative scientists should have gone to that farmer and there spent a summer studying this one reported occurrence. As it is--un-named farmer--somewhere--no date. The thing must stay damned.

Another specimen for our museum is a comment in Nature, upon these objects: that they are "of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of terrestrial, and not a celestial, character." Just why celestiality, or that of it which, too, is only of Intermediateness should not be quite as amusing as terrestriality is beyond our reasoning powers, which we have agreed are not ordinary. Of course there is nothing amusing about wedges and spheres at all--or Archimedes and Euclid are humorists. It is that they were described derisively. If you'd like a little specimen of the standardization of orthodox opinion--

Amer. Met. Jour., 4-589:

"They are of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of a terrestrial and not a celestial character."

I'm sure--not positively, of course--that we've tried to be as easy-going and lenient with Mr. Symons as his obviously scientific performance would permit. Of course it may be that sub-consciously we were prejudiced against him, instinctively classing him with St. Augustine, Darwin, St. Jerome, and Lyell. As to the "thunderstones," I think that he investigated them mostly "for the credit of Englishmen," or in the spirit of the Royal Krakatoa Committee, or about as the commission from the French Academy investigated meteorites. According to a writer in Knowledge, 5-418, the Krakatoa Committee attempted not in the least to prove what had caused the atmospheric effects of 1883, but to prove--that Krakatoa did it.

Altogether I should think that the following quotation should be enlightening to any one who still thinks that these occurrences were investigated not to support an opinion formed in advance:

In opening his paper, Mr. Symons says that he undertook his investigation as to the existence of "thunderstones," or "thunderbolts" as he calls them--"feeling certain that there was a weak point somewhere, inasmuch as `thunderbolts' have no existence."

We have another instance of the reported fall of a "cannon ball." It occurred prior to Mr. Symons' investigations, but it not mentioned by him. It was investigated, however. In the Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., 3-147, is the report of a "thunderstone," "supposed to have fallen in Hampshire, Sept., 1852." It was an iron cannon ball, or it was a "large nodule of iron pyrites or bisulphuret of iron." No one had seen it fall. It had been noticed, upon a garden path, for the first time, after a thunderstorm. It was only a "supposed" thing, because--"The mineral had not the characters of any known meteorite."

In the London Times, Sept. 16, 1852, appears a letter from Mr. George E. Bailey, a chemist of Andover, Hants. He says that, in a very heavy thunderstorm, of the first week of September, 1852, this iron object had fallen in the garden of Mr. Robert Dowling, of Andover; that it had fallen upon a path "within six yards of the house." It had been picked up "immediately" after the storm by Mrs. Dowling. It was about the size of a cricket ball: weight four pounds. No one had seen it fall. In the Times, Sept. 15, there is an account of this thunderstorm, which was of unusual violence.

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. Livingston, 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 "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 ("M. W. R." April, 1899) requested a local observer, at Vincennes, to investigate. The Editor says that the thing was only a fragment of a quartz bowlder. He says that any one with at least a public school education should know better than to write that quartz has ever fallen from the sky.

Note 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.

The baked-clay-idea was all right in its place, but it rather lacks distinction, I think. With our minds upon the concrete boats that have been building terrestrially lately, and thinking of wrecks that may occur to some of them, and of a new material for the deep-sea fishes to disregard--

Object fell at Richland, South Carolina--yellow to gray--said to look like a piece of brick (Amer. Jour. Sci., 2-34-298).

Pieces of "furnace-made" brick" said to have fallen--in a hailstorm--at Padua, Aug. 26, 1834 (Edin. New Phil. Jour., 19-87). The writer offered an explanation that started another convention: that the fragments of brick had been knocked from buildings by the hailstones. But there is here a concomitant that will be disagreeable to anyone who may have been inclined to smile at the now digestible-enough notion that furnace-made bricks have fallen from the sky. It is that in some of the hailstones--two per cent of them--that were found with the pieces of brick, was a light grayish powder.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 337-365:

Padre Sechi explains that a stone said to have fallen, in a thunderstorm, at Supino, Italy, Sept. 4, 1875, had been knocked from a roof.

Nature, 33-153:

That it had been reported that a good-sized stone, of form clearly artificial, had fallen at Naples, Nov., 1885. The stone was described by one of two professors at Naples, who had accepted it as inexplicable but veritable. They were visited by Dr. H. Johnstone-Lavis, the correspondent to Nature, whose investigations had convinced him that the object was a "shoemaker's lapstone."

Now to us of the initiated, or to us of the wider outlook, there is nothing incredible in the thought of shoemakers in other worlds--but I suspect that this characterization is tactical.

This object of worked stone, or this shoemaker's lapstone, was made of Vesuvian lava, Dr. Johnstone-Lavis thinks: most probably of lava of the flow of 1631, from the La Scala quarries. We condemn "most probably" as bad positivism. As to the "men of position," who had accepted that this thing had fallen from the sky--"I have now obliged them to admit their mistake," says Dr. Johnstone-Lavis--or it's always the stranger in Naples who knows La Scala lava better than the natives know it.

Explanation:

That the thing had been knocked from, or thrown from, a roof.

As to attempt to trace the occurrence to any special roof--nothing said upon that subject. Or that Dr. Johnstone-Lavis called a carved stone a "lapstone," quite as Mr. Symons called a spherical object a "cannon ball": bent upon a discrediting incongruity:

Shoemaking and celestiality.

It is so easy to say that axes, or wedge-shaped stones found on the ground, were there in the first place, and that it is only coincidence that lightning should strike near one--but the credibility of coincidences decreases as the square root of their volume, I think. Our massed instances speak too much of coincidences of coincidences. But the axes, or wedge-shaped objects that have been found in trees are more difficult for orthodoxy. For instance, Arago accepts that such finds have occurred, but he argues that, if wedge-shaped stones have been found in tree trunks, so have toads been found in tree trunks--did the toads fall there?

Not at all bad for a hypnotic.

Of course, in our acceptance, the Irish are the Chosen People. It's because they are characteristically best in accord with the underlying essence of quasi-existence. M. Arago answers a question by asking another question. That's the only way a question can be answered in our Hibernian kind of existence.

Dr. Bodding argued with the natives of the Santal Parganas, India, who said that cut and shaped stones had fallen from the sky, some of them lodging in tree trunks. Dr. Bodding, with orthodox notions of velocity of falling bodies, having missed, I suppose, some of the notes I have upon large hailstones, which, for size, have fallen with astonishingly low velocity, argued that anything falling from the sky would be "smashed to atoms." He accepts that objects of worked stone have been found in tree trunks, but he explains:

That the Santals often steal trees, but do not chop them down in the usual way, because that would be to make too much noise: they insert stone wedges, and hammer them instead; then, if they should get caught, wedges would not be the evidence against them that axes would be.

Or that a scientific man can't be desperate and reasonable too.

Or that a pickpocket, for instance, is safe, though caught with his hand in one's pocket, if he's gloved, say: because no court in the land would regard a gloved hand in the same way in which a bare hand would be regarded.

That there's nothing but intermediateness to the rational and the preposterous: that this status of our own ratiocination is perceptible wherein they are upon the unfamiliar.

Dr. Bodding collected 50 of these shaped stones, said to have fallen from the sky, in the course of many years. He says that the Santals are a highly developed race, and for ages have not used stone implements--except in this one nefarious convenience to him.

All explanations are localizations. They fade away before the universal. It is difficult to express that black rains in England do not originate in the smoke of factories--less difficult to express that black rains in South Africa do not. We utter little stress upon the absurdity of Dr. Bodding's explanation, because, if anything's absurd everything's absurd, or, rather, has in it some degree or aspect of absurdity, and we've never had experience with any state except something somewhere between ultimate absurdity and final reasonableness. Our acceptance is that Dr. Bodding's elaborate explanation does not apply to cut-stone objects found in tree trunks in other lands: we accept that for the general, a local explanation is inadequate.

As to "thunderstones" not said to have fallen luminously, and not said to have been found sticking in trees, we are told by faithful hypnotics that astonished rustics come upon prehistoric axes that have been washed into sight by rains, and jump to the conclusion that the things have fallen from the sky. But simple rustics come upon many prehistoric things: scrapers, pottery, knives, hammers. We have no record of rusticity coming upon old pottery after a rain, reporting the fall of a bowl from the sky.

Just now, my own acceptance is that wedge-shaped stone objects, formed by means similar to human workmanship, have often fallen from the sky. Maybe there are messages upon them. My acceptance is that they have been called "axes" to discredit them: or the more familiar a term, the higher the incongruity with vague concepts of the vast, remote, tremendous, unknown.

In Notes and Queries, 2-8-92, a writer says that he had a "thunderstone," which he had brought from Jamaica. The description is of a wedge-shaped object; not of an ax:

"It shows no mark of having been attached to a handle."

Of ten "thunderstones," figured upon different pages in Blinkenberg's book, nine show no sign of ever having been attached to a handle: one is perforated

But in a report by Dr. C. Leemans, Director of the Leyden Museum of Antiquities, objects, said by the Javanese to have fallen from the sky, are alluded to throughout as "wedges." In the Archaeologic Journal, 11-118, in a paper upon the "thunderstones" of Java, the objects are called "wedges" and not "axes."

Our notion is that rustics and savages call wedge-shaped objects that fall from the sky, "axes": that scientific men, when it suits their purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and adopt the simple: that they can be intelligible when derisive.

All of which lands us in a confusion, worse, I think, than we were in before we so satisfactorily emerged from the distresses of--butter and blood and ink and paper and punk and silk. Now it's cannon balls and axes and disks--if a "lapstone" be a disk--it's a flat stone, at any rate.

A great many scientists are good impressionists: they snub the impertinences of details. Had he been of a coarse, grubbing nature, I think Dr. Bodding could never have so simply and beautifully explained the occurrence of stone wedges in tree trunks. But to a realist, the story would be something like this:

A man who needed a tree, in a land of jungles, where, for some unknown reason, every one's selfish with his trees, conceives that hammering stone wedges makes less noise than does the chopping of wood: he and his descendants, in a course of many years, cut down trees with wedges, and escape penalty, because it never occurs to a prosecutor that the head of an ax is a wedge.

The story is like every other attempted positivism--beautiful and complete, until we see what it excludes or disregards; whereupon it becomes the ugly and incomplete--but not absolutely, because there is probably something of what is called foundation for it. Perhaps a mentally incomplete Santal did once do something of the kind. Story told to Dr. Bodding: in the usual scientific way, he makes a dogma of an aberration.

Or we did have to utter a little stress upon this matter, after all. They're so hairy and attractive, these scientists of the 19th century. We feel the zeal of a Sitting Bull when we think of their scalps. We shall have to have an expression of our own upon this confusing subject. We have expressions: we don't call them explanations: we've discarded explanations with beliefs. Though every one who scalps is, in the oneness of allness, himself likely to be scalped, there is such a discourtesy to an enemy as the wearing of wigs.

Cannon balls and wedges, and what may they mean?

Bombardments of this earth--

Attempts to communicate--

Or visitors to this earth, long ago--explorers from the moon--taking back with them, as curiosities, perhaps, implements of this earth's prehistoric inhabitants--a wreck--a cargo of such things held for ages in suspension in the Super-Sargasso Sea--falling, or shaken, down occasionally by storms--

But, by the preponderance of description, we can not accept that "thunderstones" ever were attached to handles, or are prehistoric axes--

As to attempts to communicate with this earth, by means of wedge-shaped objects especially adapted to the penetration of vast, gelatinous areas spread around this earth--

In the Proc. Roy. Irish Acad., 9-337, there is an account of a stone wedge that fell from the sky, near Cashel, Co. Tipperary, Aug. 2, 1865. The phenomenon is not questioned, but the orthodox preference is to call it, not ax-like, nor wedge-shaped, but "pyramidal." For data of other pyramidal stones said to have fallen from the sky, see Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1861-34. One fell at Segowolee, India, March 6, 1853. Of the object that fell at Cashel, Dr. Haughton says in the Proceedings: "A singular feature is observable in this stone that I have never yet seen in any other:--the rounded edges of the pyramid are sharply marked by lines on the black crust, as perfect as if made by a ruler." Dr. Haughton's idea is that the marks may have been made by "some peculiar tension in the cooling." It must have been very peculiar, if in all aerolites not wedge-shaped, no such phenomenon had ever been observed. It merges away with one or two instances known, after Dr. Haughton's time, of seeming stratification in meteorites. Stratification in meteorites, however, is denied by the faithful.

I begin to suspect something else.

A whopper is coming.

Later it will be as reasonable, by familiarity, as anything else ever said.

If someone should study the stone of Cashel, as Champollion studied the Rosetta stone, he might--or, rather, would inevitably--find meaning in those lines, and translate them into English--

Nevertheless I begin to suspect something else: something more subtle and esoteric than graven characters upon stones that have fallen from the sky, in attempts to communicate. The notion that other worlds are attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion is that it is not attempt at all--that it was achievement centuries ago.

I should like to send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen, say, somewhere in New Hampshire--

And keep track of every person who came to examine that stone--trace down his affiliations--keep track of him--

Then send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen at Stockholm, say--

Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hampshire, be met again in Stockholm? But--what if he had no anthropological, lapidarian, or meteorological affiliations--but did belong to a secret society--

It is only a dawning credulity.

Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, fallen from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most striking. So far, in this respect, we have been at our worst--possibly that's pretty bad--but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable variety of form, and something that is said to have fallen at sometime somewhere in the Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the unchosen.

Now we shall have something that is high up in the castes of the accursed:

Comptes Rendus, 1887-182:

That, upon June 20, 1887, in a "violent storm"--two months before the reported fall of the symmetric iron object of Brixton--a small stone had fallen from the sky at Tarbes, France: 13 millimeters in diameter; 5 millimeters thick; weight 2 grammes. Reported to the French Academy by M. Sudre, professor of the Normal School, Tarbes.

This time the old convenience "there in the first place" is too greatly resisted--the stone was covered with ice.

This object had been cut and shaped by means similar to human hands and human mentality. It was a disk of worked stone--"tres regulier." "Il a été assurement travaillé."

There's not a word as to any known whirlwind anywhere: nothing of other objects or débris that fell at or near this date, in France. The thing had fallen alone. But as mechanically as any part of a machine responds to its stimulus, the explanation appears in Comptes Rendus, that this stone had been raised by a whirlwind and then flung down.

It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In La Nature, 1887, and in L'Année Scientifique, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of Nature, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the Annuaire de Soc. Met., 1887.

Not a word of discussion.

Not a subsequent mention can I find.

Our own expression:

What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain?

A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.

Book of the Damned Chapter IX

MY own pseudo-conclusion:

That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves; that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.

Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the accursed.

If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of dream-phantasms.

Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky--as if in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the essence of everything, or in merging away of everything into something else, there could be anything that could be accounted for in only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason that if something can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted for in that way--or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it imposes, but, of course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be found in quasi-existence. In our acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are, in our "existence," premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning awareness of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer.

Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of "true meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may seem incredible that modern curators still have this delusion, but we suspect that the date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity all day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn that some of the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a field"--"found in making a road"--"turned up by the plow" occurs a dozen times. Someone fishing in Lake Okechobee, brought up an object in his fishing net. No meteorite had ever been seen to fall near it. The U.S. National Museum accepts it.

If we accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic material"--one instance of "carbonaceous" matter--if it be too difficult to utter the word "coal"--we see that in this inclusion-exclusion, as in every other means of forming an opinion, false inclusion and false exclusion have been practiced by curators of museums.

There is something of ultra-pathos--of cosmic sadness--in this universal search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by either inspiration or analysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown--or renewed hope and search for the special that can be true, or for something local that could also be universal. It's as if "true meteoritic material" were a "rock of ages" to some scientific men. They cling. But clingers cannot hold out welcoming arms.

The only seemingly conclusive utterance, or seemingly substantial thing to cling to, is a product of dishonesty, ignorance, or fatigue. All sciences go back and back, until they're worn out with the process, or until mechanical reaction occurs: then they move forward--as it were. Then they become dogmatic, and take for bases, positions that were only points of exhaustion. So chemistry divided and sub-divided down to atoms; then, in the essential insecurity of all quasi-constructions, it built up a system, which, to anyone so obsessed by his own hypnoses that he is exempt to the chemist's hypnoses, is perceptibly enough an intellectual anæmia built upon infinitesimal debilities.

In Science, 31-298, E. D. Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, asserts or confesses, that often have objects of material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him. He says that these things have been accompanied by assurances that they have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses.

They are all excluded. They are not of true meteoritic material. They were on the ground in the first place. It is only by coincidence that lightning has struck, or that a real meteorite, which was unfindable, has struck near objects of slag and limestone.

Mr. Hovey says that the list might be extended indefinitely. That's a tantalizing suggestion of some very interesting stuff--

He says:

"But it is not worth while."

I'd like to know what strange, damned, excommunicated things have been sent to museums by persons who have felt convinced that they had seen what they may have seen, strongly enough to risk ridicule, to make up bundles, go to express offices, and write letters. I accept that over the door of every museum, into which such things enter, is written:

"Abandon Hope."

If a Mr. Symons mentions one instance of coal, or of slag or cinders, said to have fallen from the sky, we are not--except by association with the "carbonaceous" meteorites--strong in our impression that coal sometimes falls to this earth from coal-burning super-constructions, up somewhere--

In Comptes Rendus, 91-197, M. Daubrée tells the same story. Our acceptance, then, is that other curators could tell this same story. Then the phantomosity of our impression substantiates proportionately to its multiplicity. M. Daubrée says that often have strange damned things been sent to the French museums, accompanied by assurances that they had been seen to fall from the sky. Especially to our interest, he mentions coal and slag.

Excluded.

Buried un-named and undated in Science's potter's field.

I do not say that the data of the damned should have the same rights as the data of the saved. That would be justice. That would be of the Positive Absolute, and, though the ideal of, a violation of, the very essence of quasi-existence, wherein only to have the appearance of being is to express a preponderance of force one way or another--or inequilibrium, or inconsistency, or injustice.

Our acceptance is that the passing away of exclusionism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century: that gods of the twentieth century will sustain our notions be they ever so unwashed and frowsy. But, in our own expressions, we are limited, by the oneness of quasiness, to the very same methods by which orthodoxy established and maintains its now sleek, suave preposterousness. At any rate, though we are inspired by an especial subtle essence--or imponderable, I think--that pervades the twentieth century, we have not the superstition that we are offering anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that we're any less superstitious and credulous than any logician, savage, curator, or rustic.

An orthodox demonstration, in terms of which we shall have some heresies, is that if things found in coal could have got there only by falling there--they fell there.

So, in the Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Mems., 2-9-306, it is argued that certain roundish stones that have been found in coal are "fossil aerolites": that they had fallen from the sky, ages ago, when the coal was soft, because the coal had closed around them, showing no sign of entrance.⁽⁴⁾

Proc. Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland, 1-1-121:

That, in a lump of coal, from a mine in Scotland, an iron instrument had been found--

"The interest attaching to this singular relic arises from the fact of its having been found in the heart of a piece of coal, seven feet under the surface."

If we accept that this object of iron was of workmanship beyond the means and skill of the primitive men who may have lived in Scotland when coal was forming there--

"The instrument was considered to be modern."

That our expression has more of realness, or higher approximation to realness, than has the attempt to explain that is made in the Proceedings:

That in modern times someone may have bored for coal, and that his drill may have broken off in the coal it had penetrated.

Why he should have abandoned such easily accessible coal, I don't know. The important point is that there was no sign of boring: that this instrument was in a lump of coal that had closed around it so that its presence was no suspected, until the lump of coal was broken.

No mention can I find of this damned thing in my other publication. Of course there is an alternative here: the thing may not have fallen from the sky: if in coal-forming times, in Scotland, there were indigenous to this earth, no men capable of making such an iron instrument, it may have been left behind by visitors from other worlds.

In an extraordinary approximation to fairness and justice, which is permitted to us, because we are quite desirous to make acceptable that nothing can be proved as we are to sustain our own expressions, we note:

That in Notes and Queries, 11-1-408, there is an account of an ancient copper seal, about the size of a penny, found in chalk, at a depth of from five to six feet, near Bredenstone, England. The design upon it is said to be of a monk kneeling before a virgin and child: a legend upon the margin is said to be: "S. Jordanis Monachi Spaldingie."

I don't know about that. It looks very desirable--undesirable to us.

There's a wretch of an ultra-frowsy thing in the Scientific American, 7-298, which we condemn ourselves, if somewhere, because of the oneness of allness, the damned must also be the damning. It's a newspaper story: that on June 5, 1852, a powerful blast, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, cast out from a bed of solid rock a bell-shaped vessel of an unknown metal: floral designs inlaid with silver; "art of some cunning workman." The opinion of the Editor of the Scientific American is that the thing had been made by Tubal Cain, who was the first inhabitant of Dorchester. Though I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not disposed to fly rabidly at every scientific opinion.

Nature, 35-36:

A block of metal found in coal, in Austria, 1885. It is now in the Salsburg museum.

This time we have another expression. Usually our intermediatist attack upon provincial positivism is: Science, in its attempted positivism takes something such as "true meteoritic material" as a standard of judgment; but carbonaceous matter, except for its relative infrequency, is just as veritable a standard of judgment; carbonaceous matters merges away into such a variety of organic substances, that all standards are reduced to indistinguishability: if then, there is no real standard against us, there is no real resistance to our own acceptances. Now our intermediatism is: Science takes "true meteoritic material" as a standard of admission; but now we have an instance that quite as truly makes "true meteoritic material" a standard of exclusion; or, then, a thing that denies itself is no real resistance to our own acceptances--this depending upon whether we have a datum of something of "true meteoritic material" that orthodoxy can never accept fell from the sky.

We're a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a carved, geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates human life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an indigenous product of this earth: but we're quite as much interested in the dilemma it made for the faithful.

It is of "true meteoritic material." In L'Astronomie, 7-114, it is said that, though so geometric, its phenomena so characteristic of meteorites exclude the idea that it was the work of man.

As to the deposit--Tertiary coal.

Composition--iron carbon, and a small quantity of nickel.

It has a pitted surface that is supposed by the faithful to be characteristic of meteorites.

For a full account of this subject, see Comptes Rendus, 103-702. The scientists who examined it could reach no agreement. They bifurcated: then a compromise was suggested; but the compromise is a product of disregard:

That it was of true meteoritic material, and had not been shaped by man;

That it was not of true meteoritic material, but telluric iron that had been shaped by man;

That it was true meteoritic material that had fallen from the sky, but had been shaped by man, after its fall.

The data, one or more of which must be disregarded by each of these three explanations, are: "true meteoritic material" and surface markings of meteorites; geometric form; presence in an ancient deposit; material as hard as steel; absence upon this earth, in Tertiary times, of men who could work in material as hard as steel. It is said that, though of "true meteoritic material," this object is virtually a steel object.

St. Augustine, with his orthodoxy, was never in--well, very much worse--difficulties than are the faithful here. By due disregard of a datum or so, our own acceptance that it was a steel object that had fallen from the sky to this earth, in Tertiary times, is not forced upon one. We offer ours as the only synthetic expression. For instance, in Science Gossip, 1887-58, it is described as a meteorite: in this account there is nothing alarming to the pious, because, though everything else is told, its geometric form is not mentioned.

It's a cube. There is a deep incision all around it. Of its faces, two that are opposite are rounded.

Though I accept that our own expression can only rather approximate to Truth, by the wideness of its inclusions, and because it seems, of four attempts, to represent the only complete synthesis, and can be nullified or greatly modified by data that we, too, have somewhere disregarded, the only means of nullification that I can think of would be demonstration that this object is a mass of iron pyrites, which sometimes form geometrically. But the analysis mentions not a trace of sulphur. Of course our weakness, or impositiveness, lies in that, by any one to whom it would be agreeable to find sulphur in this thing, sulphur would be found in it--by our intermediatism there is some sulphur in everything, or sulphur is only a localization or emphasis of something that, unemphasized, is in all things.

So there have, or haven't, been found upon this earth things that fell from the sky, or that were left behind by extra-mundane visitors to this earth--

A yarn in the London Times, June 22, 1844: that some workmen, quarrying rock, close to the Tweed, about a quarter of a mile below Rutherford Mills, discovered a gold thread embedded in the stone, at a depth of eight feet: that a piece of the gold thread had been sent to the office of the Kelso Chronicle.

Pretty little thing; not at all frowsy; rather damnable.

London Times, Dec. 24, 1851:

That Hiram De Witt, of Springfield, Massachusetts, returning from California, had brought with him a piece of auriferous quartz about the size of a man's fist. It was accidentally dropped--split open--nail in it. There was a cut-iron nail, size of a six-penny nail, slightly corroded. "It was entirely straight and had a perfect head."

Or--California--ages ago, when auriferous quartz was forming--super-carpenter, a million miles or so up in the air--drops a nail.

To one not an intermediatist, it would seem incredible that this datum, not only of the damned, but of the lowest of the damned, or of the journalistic caste of the accursed, could merge away with something else damned only by disregard, and backed by what is called "highest scientific authority"--

Communication by Sir David Brewster (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1845-51):

That a nail had been found in a block of stone from Kingoodie Quarry, North Britain. The block in which the nail was found was nine inches thick, but as to what part of the quarry it had come from, there is no evidence--except that it could not have been from the surface. The quarry had been worked about twenty years. It consisted of alternate layers of hard stone and a substance called "till." The point of the nail, quite eaten with rust, projected into some "till," upon the surface of the block of stone. The rest of the nail lay upon the surface of the stone to within an inch of the head--that inch of it was embedded in the stone.

Although its caste is high, this is a thing profoundly of the damned--sort of a Brahmin as regarded by a Baptist. Its case was stated fairly; Brewster related all circumstances available to him--but there was no discussion at the meeting of the British Association: no explanation was offered--

Nevertheless the thing can be nullified--

But the nullification that we find is as much against orthodoxy, in one respect as it is against our own expression that inclusion in quartz or sandstone indicates antiquity--or there would have to be a revision of prevailing dogmas upon quartz and sandstone and age indicated by them, if the opposing data should be accepted. Of course it may be contended by both the orthodox and us heretics that the opposition is only a yarn from a newspaper. By an odd combination, we find our two lost souls that have tried to emerge, chucked back to perdition by one blow:

Popular Science News, 1884-41:

That, according to the Carson Appeal, there had been found in a mine, quartz crystals that could have had only fifteen years in which to form: that, where a mill had been built, sandstone had been found, when the mill was torn down, that had hardened in twelve years: that in this sandstone was a piece of wood with "a rusty nail" in it.

Annals of Scientific Discovery, 1853-71:

That, at the meeting of the British Association, 1853, Sir David Brewster had announced that he had to bring before the meeting an object "of so incredible a nature that nothing short of the strongest evidence was necessary to render the statement at all probable."

A crystal lens had been found in the treasure-house at Ninevah.

In many of the temples and treasure houses of old civilizations upon this earth have been preserved things that have fallen from the sky--or meteorites.

Again we have a Brahmin. This thing is buried alive in the heart of propriety: it is in the British Museum.

Carpenter, in The Microscope and Its Revelations, gives two drawings of it. Carpenter argues that it is impossible to accept that optical lenses had ever been made by the ancients. Never occurred to him--some one a million miles or so up in the air--looking through his telescope--lens drops out.

This does not appeal to Carpenter: he says that this object must have been an ornament.

According to Brewster, it was not an ornament, but "a true optical lens."

In that case, in ruins of an old civilization upon this earth, has been found an accursed thing that was, acceptably, not a product of any old civilization indigenous to this earth.

Book of the Damned Chapter X

EARLY explorers have Florida mixed up with Newfoundland. But the confusion is worse than that still earlier. It arises from simplicity. Very early explorers think that all land westward is one land, India: awareness of other lands as well as India comes as a slow process. I do not now think of things arriving upon this earth from some especial other world. That was my notion when I started to collect our data. Or, as is a commonplace of observation, all intellection begins with the illusion of homogeneity. It's one of Spencer's data: we see homogeneousness in all things distant, or with which we have small acquaintance. Advance from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous is Spencerian Philosophy--like everything else, so-called: not that it was really Spencer's discovery, but was taken from von Baer, who, in turn, was continuous with preceding evolutionary speculation. Our own expression is that all things are acting to advance to the homogeneous, or are trying to localize Homogeneousness. Homogeneousness is an aspect of the Universal, wherein it is a state that does not merge away into something else. We regard homogeneousness as an aspect of positiveness, but it is our acceptance that infinite frustrations of attempts to positivize manifest themselves in infinite heterogeneity: so that though things try to localize homogeneousness they end up in heterogeneity so great that it amounts to infinite dispersion or indistinguishability.

So all concepts are little attempted positivenesses, but soon have to give in to compromise, modification, nullification, merging away into indistinguishability--unless, here and there, in the world's history, there may have been a super-dogmatist, who, for only an infinitesimal of time, has been able to hold out against heterogeneity or modification or doubt or "listening to reason," or loss of identity--in which case--instant translation to heaven or the Positive Absolute.

Odd thing about Spencer is that he never recognized that "homogeneity," "integration," and "definiteness" are all words for the same state, or the state we call "positiveness." What we call his mistake is in that he regarded "homogeneousness" as negative.

I began with a notion of some one other world, from which objects and substances have fallen to this earth; which had, or which, to less degree, has a tutelary interest in this earth; which is now attempting to communicate with this earth--modifying, because of data which will pile up later, into acceptance that some other world is not attempting but has been, for centuries, in communication with a sect, perhaps, or a secret society, or certain esoteric ones of this earth's inhabitants.

I lose a great deal of hypnotic power in not being able to concentrate attention upon some one other world.

As I have admitted before I'm intelligent, as contrasted with the orthodox. I haven't the aristocratic disregard of a New York curator or an Eskimo medicine-man.

I have to dissipate myself in acceptance of a host of other worlds: size of the moon, some of them: one of them, at least,--tremendous thing: we'll take that up later. Vast, amorphous aerial regions, to which such definite words as "worlds" and "planets" seem inapplicable. And artificial constructions that I have called "super-constructions": one of them about the size of Brooklyn, I should say, off hand. And one or more of them wheel-shaped things, a goodly number of square miles in area.

I think that earlier in this book, before we liberalized into embracing everything that comes along, your indignation, or indigestion would have expressed in the notion that, if this were so, astronomers would have seen these other worlds and regions and vast geometric constructions. You'd have had that notion: you'd have stopped there.

But the attempt to stop is saying "enough" to the insatiable. In cosmic punctuation there are no periods: illusions of periods is incomplete view of colons and semi-colons.

We can't stop with the notion that if there were such phenomena, astronomers would have seen them. Because of our experience with suppression and disregard, we suspect, before we go into the subject at all, that astronomers have seen them; that navigators and meteorologists have seen them; that individual scientists and other trained observers have seen them many times--

That it is the System that has excluded data of them.

As to the Law of Gravitation, and astronomers' formulas, remember that these formulas worked out in the time of La Place as well as they do now. But there are hundreds of planetary bodies now known that were then not known. So a few hundred worlds more of ours won't make any difference. La Place knew of about only thirty bodies in this solar system: about six hundred are recognized now--

What are the discoveries of geology and biology to a theologian?

His formulas still work out as well as they ever did.

If the Law of Gravitation could be stated as a real utterance, it might be a real resistance to us. But we are told only that gravitation is gravitation. Of course to an intermediatist, nothing can be defined in terms of itself--but even the orthodox, in what seems to me to be the innate premonitions of realness, not founded upon experience, agree that to define a thing in terms of itself is not real definition. It is said that by gravitation is meant the attraction of all things proportionately to mass and inversely as the square of the distance. Mass would mean inter-attraction holding together final particles, if there were final particles. Then, until final particles be discovered, only one term of this expression survives, or mass is attraction. But distance is only extent of mass, unless one holds out for absolute vacuum among planets, a position against which we could bring a host of data. But there is no possible means of expressing that gravitation is anything other than attraction. So there is nothing to resist us but such a phantom as--that gravitation is the gravitation of all gravitations proportionately to gravitation and inversely as the square of gravitation. In a quasi-existence, nothing more sensible than this can be said upon any so-called subject--perhaps there are higher approximations to ultimate sensibleness.

Nevertheless we seem to have a feeling that with the System against us we have a kind of resistance here. We'd have felt so formerly, at any rate: I think the Dr. Grays and Prof. Hitchcocks have modified our trustfulness toward indistinguishability. As to the perfection of this System that quasi-opposes us and the infallibility of its mathematics--as if there could be real mathematics in a mode of seeming where twice two are not four--we've been told over and over again of their vindication in the discovery of Neptune.

I'm afraid that the course we're taking will turn out like every other development. We began humbly, admitting that we're of the damned--

But our eyebrows--

Just a faint flicker in them, or in one of them, every time we hear of the "triumphal discovery of Neptune"--this "monumental achievement of theoretical astronomy," as the text books call it.

The whole trouble is that we've looked it up.

The text-books omit this:

That, instead of the orbit of Neptune agreeing with the calculations of Adams and Leverrier, it was so different--that Leverrier said that it was not the planet of his calculations.

Later it was thought best to say no more upon that subject.

The text-books omit this:

That, in 1846, everyone who knew a sine from a cosine was out sining and cosining for a planet beyond Uranus.

Two of them guessed right.

To some minds, even after Leverrier's own rejection of Neptune, the word "guessed" may be objectionable--but, according to Prof. Peirce, of Harvard, the calculations of Adams and Leverrier would have applied quite as well to positions many degrees from the position of Neptune.

Or for Prof. Peirce's demonstration that the discovery of Neptune was only a "happy accident," see Proc. Amer. Acad. Sciences, 1-65.

For references, see Lowell's Evolution of Worlds.

Or comets: another nebulous resistance to our own notions. As to eclipses, I have notes upon several of them that did not occur upon scheduled time, though with differences only of seconds--and one delightful lost soul, deep-buried, but buried in the ultra-respectable records of the Royal Astronomical Society, upon an eclipse that did not occur at all. That delightful, ultra-sponsored thing of perdition is too good and malicious to be dismissed with passing notice: we'll have him later.

Throughout the history of astronomy, every comet that has come back upon predicted time--not that, essentially, there was anything more abstruse about it than is a prediction that you can make of a postman's periodicities to-morrow--was advertised for all it was worth. It's the way reputations are worked up for fortune-tellers by the faithful. The comets that didn't come back--omitted or explained. Or Encke's comet. It came back slower and slower. But the astronomers explained. They had it all worked out and formulated and "proved" why that comet was coming back slower and slower--and there the dam thing began coming faster and faster.

Halley's comet.

Astronomy--"the perfect science, as we astronomers like to call it." (Jacoby.)

It's my own notion that if, in a real existence, an astronomer could not tell one longitude from another, he'd be sent back to this purgatory of ours until he could meet that simple requirement.

Halley was sent to the Cape of Good Hope to determine its longitude. He got it degrees wrong. He gave to Africa's noble Roman promontory a retroussé twist that would take the pride out of any Kaffir.

We hear everlastingly of Halley's comet. It came back--maybe. But, unless we look the matter up in contemporaneous records, we hear nothing of--the Leonids, for instance. By the same methods as those by which Halley's comet was predicted, the Leonids were predicted. Nov., 1898--no Leonids. It was explained. They had been perturbed. They would appear in November, 1899. Nov., 1899--Nov., 1900--no Leonids.

My notion of astronomic accuracy:

Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?

As to Halley's comet, of 1910--everybody now swears he saw it. He has to perjure himself: otherwise he'd be accused of having no interest in great, inspiring things that he's never given attention to.

Regard this:

That there was never a moment when there is not some comet in the sky. Virtually there is no year in which several new comets are not discovered, so plentiful are they. Luminous fleas on a vast black dog--in popular impressions, there is no realization of the extent to which this solar system is flea-bitten.

If a comet has not the orbit that astronomers have predicted--perturbed. If--like Halley's comet--it be late--even a year late--perturbed. When a train is an hour late, we have small opinion of the prediction of timetables. When a comet's a year late, all we ask is--that it be explained. We hear of the inflation and arrogance of astronomers. My own acceptance is not that they are imposing upon us: that they are requiting us. For many of us priests no longer function to give us seeming rapport with Perfection, Infallibility--the Positive Absolute. Astronomers have stepped forward to fill a vacancy--with quasi-phantomosity--but, in our acceptance, with a higher approximation to substantiality than had the attenuations that preceded them. I should say, myself, that all that we call progress is not so much response to "urge" as it is response to a hiatus--or if you want something to grow somewhere, dig out everything else in its area. So I have to accept that the positive assurances of astronomers are necessary to us, or the blunderings, evasions and disguises of astronomers would never be tolerated: that, given such latitude as they are permitted to take, they could not be very disastrously mistaken. Suppose the comet called Halley's had not appeared--

Early in 1910, a far more important comet than the anaemic luminosity said to be Halley's, appeared. It was so brilliant that it was visible in daylight. The astronomers would have been saved anyway. If this other comet did not have the predicted orbit--perturbation. If you're going to Coney Island, and predict there'll be a special kind of pebble on the beach, I don't see how you can disgrace yourself, if some other pebble will do just as well--because the feeble thing said to have been seen in 1910 was no more in accord with the sensational descriptions given out by astronomers in advance than is a pale pebble with a brick-red bowlder.

I predict that next Wednesday, a large Chinaman, in evening clothes, will cross Broadway, at 42nd Street, at 9 P.M. He doesn't, but a tubercular Jap in a sailor's uniform does cross Broadway, at 35th Street, Friday, at noon. Well, a Jap is a perturbed Chinaman, and clothes are clothes.

I remember the terrifying predictions made by the honest and credulous astronomers, who must have been themselves hypnotized, or they could not have hypnotized the rest of us, in 1909. Wills were made. Human life might be swept from this planet. In quasi-existence, which is essentially Hibernian, that would be no reason why wills should not be made. The less excitable of us did expect at least some pretty good fireworks.

I have to admit that it is said that, in New York, a light was seen in the sky.

It was about as terrifying as the scratch of a match on the seat of some breeches half a mile away.

It was not on time.

Though I have heard that a faint nebulosity, which I did not see, myself, though I looked when I was told to look, was seen in the sky, it appeared several days after the time predicted.

A hypnotized host of imbeciles of us: told to look up at the sky: we did--like a lot of pointers hypnotized by a partridge.

The effect:

Almost everybody now swears that he saw Halley's comet, and that is was a glorious spectacle.

An interesting circumstance here is that seemingly we are trying to discredit astronomers because astronomers oppose us--that's not my impression. We shall be in the Brahmin caste of the hell of the Baptists. Almost all our data, in some regiments of this procession, are observations by astronomers, few of them mere amateur astronomers. It is the System that opposes us. It is the System that is suppressing astronomers. I think we pity them in their captivity. Ours is not malice--in a positive sense. It's chivalry--somewhat. Unhappy astronomers looking out from high towers in which they are imprisoned--we appear on the horizon.

But, as I have said, our data do not relate to some especial other world. I mean very much what a savage upon an ocean island might think of in his speculations--not upon some other land, but complexes of continents and their phenomena: cities, factories in cities, means of communication--

Now all the other savages would know of a few vessels sailing in their regular routes, passing this island in regularized periodicities. The tendency in these minds would be expression of the universal tendency toward positivism--or Completeness--or conviction that these few regularized vessels constituted all. Now I think of some especial savage who suspects otherwise--because he's very backward and unimaginative and insensible to the beautiful ideals of the others: not piously occupied, like the others, in bowing before impressive-looking sticks of wood; dishonestly taking time for his speculations, while the other are patriotically witch-finding. So the other higher and nobler savages know about the few regularized vessels: know when to expect them; have their periodicities all worked out; just about when vessels will pass, or eclipse each other--explaining all vagaries were due to atmospheric conditions.

They'd come out strong in explaining.

You can't read a book upon savages without noting what resolute explainers they are.

They'd say all this mechanism was founded upon the mutual attraction of vessels--deduced from the fall of a monkey from a palm tree--or, if not that, that devils were pushing the vessels--something of the kind.

Storms.

Débris, not from these vessels, cast up by the waves.

Disregarded.

How can one think of something and something else, too?

I'm in a state of mind of a savage who might find upon a shore, washed up by the same storm, buoyant parts of a piano and a paddle that is carved by cruder hands than his own: something light and summery from India, and a fur overcoat from Russia--or all science, though approximating wider and wider, is attempt to conceive of India in terms of an ocean island, and of Russia in terms of India so interpreted. Though I am trying to think of Russia and India in world-wide terms, I cannot think that that, or the universalizing of the local, is cosmic purpose. The higher idealist is the positivist who tries to localize the universal, and is in accord with cosmic purpose: the super-dogmatist of a local savage who can hold out, without a flurry of doubt, that a piano washed up on a beach is the trunk of a palm tree that a shark has bitten, leaving his teeth in it. So we fear for the soul of Dr. Gray, because he did not devote his whole life to that one stand that, whether possible or inconceivable, thousands of fishes had been cast from one bucket.

So, unfortunately for myself, if salvation be desirable, I look out widely but amorphously, indefinitely and heterogeneously. If I say I conceive of another world that is now in secret communication with certain esoteric inhabitants of this earth, I say I conceive of still other worlds that are trying to establish communication with all the inhabitants of this earth. I fit my notions to the data I find. That is supposed to be the right and logical and scientific thing to do; but it is no way to approximate to form, system, organization. Then I think I conceive of other worlds and vast structures that pass us by, within a few miles, without the slightest desire to communicate, quite as tramp vessels pass many islands without particularizing one from another. Then I think I have data of a vast construction that has often come to this earth, dipped into an ocean, submerged there a while, then going away--Why? I'm not absolutely sure. How would an Eskimo explain a vessel, sending ashore for coal, which is plentiful upon some Arctic beaches, though of unknown use to the natives, then sailing away, with no interest in the natives?

A great difficulty in trying to understand vast constructions that show no interest in us:

The notion that we must be interesting.

I accept that, though we're usually avoided, probably for moral reasons, sometimes this earth has been visited by explorers. I think that the notion that there have been extra-mundane visitors to China, within what we call the historic period, will be only ordinarily absurd, when we come to that datum.

I accept that some of the other worlds are of conditions very similar to our own. I think of others that are very different--so that visitors from them could not live here--without artificial adaptations.

How some of them could breathe our attenuated air, if they came from a gelatinous atmosphere--

Masks.

The masks that have been found in ancient deposits.

Most of them are of stone, and are said to have been ceremonial regalia of savages--

But the mask that was found in Sullivan County, Missouri, in 1879 (American Antiquarian, 3-336).

It is made of iron and silver.

Book of the Damned Chapter XI

ONE of the damdest in our whole saturnalia of the accursed--

Because it is hopeless to try to shake off an excommunication only by saying that we're damned by blacker things than ourselves; and that the damned are those who admit they're of the damned. Inertia and hypnosis are too strong for us. We say that: then we go right on admitting we're the damned. It is only by being more nearly real that we can sweep away the quasi-things that oppose us. Of course, as a whole, we have considerable amorphousness, but we are thinking now of "individual" acceptances. Wideness is an aspect of Universalness or Realness. If our syntheses disregard fewer data than do opposing syntheses--which are often not syntheses at all, but mere consideration of some circumstance--less widely synthetic things fade away before us. Harmony is an aspect of the Universal, by which we mean Realness. If we approximate more highly to harmony among the parts of an expression and to all available circumstances of an occurrence, the self-contradictors turn hazy. Solidity is an aspect of realness. We pile them up, and we pile them up, or they pass and pass and pass: things that bulk large as they march by, supporting and solidifying one another--

And still, and for the regiments to come, hypnosis and inertia rule us--

One of the dam-dest of our data:

In the Scientific American, Sept. 10, 1910, Charles F. Holder writes:

"Many years ago, a strange stone resembling a meteorite, fell into the valley of the Yaqui, Mexico, and the sensational story went from one end to the other of the country that a stone bearing human inscriptions had descended to the earth."

The bewildering observation here is Mr. Holder's assertion that this stone did fall. It seems to me that he must mean that it fell by dislodgment from a mountain side into a valley--but we shall see that it was such a marked stone that very unlikely would it have been unknown to dwellers in the valley, if it had been reposing upon a mountainside above them. It may have been carelessness: intent may have been to say that a sensational story of a strange stone said to have fallen, etc.

This stone was reported by Major Frederick Burnham, of the British Army. Later Major Burnham re-visited it, and Mr. Holder accompanied him, their purpose to decipher the inscriptions upon it, if possible.

"This stone was a brown, igneous rock, its longest axis about eight feet, and on the eastern face, which had an angle of about forty-five degrees, was the deep-cut inscription."

Mr. Holder says that he recognized familiar Mayan symbols in the inscription. His method was the usual method by which anything can be "identified" as anything else: that is to pick out whatever is agreeable and disregard the rest. He says that he has demonstrated that most of the symbols are Mayan. One of our intermediatist pseudo-principles is that any way of demonstrating anything is just as good a way of demonstrating anything else. By Mr. Holder's method we could demonstrate that we're Mayan--if that should be a source of pride to us. One of the characters upon this stone is a circle within a circle--similar character found by Mr. Holder in a Mayan manuscript. There are two 6's. 6's can be found in Mayan manuscripts. A double scroll. There are dots and there are dashes. Well, then, in turn, disregard the circle within a circle and the double scroll and emphasize that 6's occur in this book, and that dots are plentiful, and would be more plentiful if it were customary to use the small "i" for the first personal pronoun--that when it comes to dashes--that's demonstrated: we're Mayan.

I suppose the tendency is to feel that we're sneering at some valuable archæologic work, and that Mr. Holder did make a veritable identification.

He writes:

"I submitted the photographs to the Field Museum and the Smithsonian and one or two others, and, to my surprise, the reply was that they could make nothing out of it."

Our indefinite acceptance, by preponderance of three or four groups of museum-experts against one person, is that a stone bearing inscriptions unassimilable with any known language upon this earth, is said to have fallen from the sky. Another poor wretch of an outcast belonging here is noted in the Scientific American, 48-261: that, of an object, or a meteorite, that fell Feb. 16, 1883, near Brescia, Italy, a false report was circulated that one of the fragments bore the impress of a hand. That's all that is findable by me upon this mere gasp of a thing. Intermediatistically, my acceptance is that, though in the course of human history, there have been some notable approximations, there never has been a real liar: that he could not survive in intermediateness, where everything merges away or has its pseudo-base in something else--would be instantly translated to the Negative Absolute. So my acceptance is that, though curtly dismissed, there was something to base upon in this report; that there were unusual markings upon this object. Of course that is not to jump to the conclusion that they were cuneiform characters that looked like fingerprints.

Altogether, I think that in some of our past expressions, we must have been very efficient, if the experience of Mr. Symons be typical, so indefinite are we becoming here. Just here we are interested in many things that have been found, especially in the United States, which speak of a civilization, or of many civilizations not indigenous to this earth. One trouble is in trying to decide whether they fell here from the sky, or were left behind by visitors from other worlds. We have a notion that there have been disasters aloft, and that coins were dropped here: that inhabitants of this earth found them or saw them fall, and then made coins imitatively: it may be that coins were showered here by something of a tutelary nature that undertook to advance us from the stage of barter to the use of a medium. If coins should be identified as Roman coins, we've had so much experience with "identifications" that we know a phantom when we see one--but, even so, how could Roman coins have got to North America--far in the interior of North America--or buried under the accumulation of centuries of soil--unless they did drop from--wherever the first Romans came from? Ignatius Donnelly, in "Atlantis," gives a list of objects that have been found in mounds that are supposed to antedate all European influence in America: lathe-made articles, such as traders--from somewhere--would supply to savages--marks of the lathe said to be unmistakable. Said to be: of course we can't accept that anything is unmistakable. In the Rept. Smithson. Inst., 1881-619, there is an account, by Charles C. Jones, of two silver crosses that were found in Georgia. They are skillfully made, highly ornamented crosses, but are not conventional crucifixes: all arms of equal length. Mr. Jones is a good positivist--that De Sota had halted at the "precise" spot where these crosses were found. But the spirit of negativeness that lurks in all things said to be "precise" shows itself in that upon one of these crosses in an inscription that has no meaning in Spanish or any other known, terrestrial language:

"IYNKICIDU," according to Mr. Jones. He thinks that this is a name, and that there is an aboriginal ring to it, though I should say, myself, that he was thinking of the far-distant Incas: that the Spanish donor cut on the cross the name of an Indian to whom it was presented. But we look at the inscription ourselves and see that the letters said to be "C" and "D" are turned the wrong way, and that the letter said to be "K" is not only turned the wrong way, but is upside down.

It is difficult to accept that the remarkable, the very extensive, copper mines in the region of Lake Superior, were ever the works of American aborigines. Despite the astonishing extent of these mines, nothing has ever been found to indicate that the region was ever inhabited by permanent dwellers--"...not a vestige of a dwelling, a skeleton, or a bone has been found." The Indians have no traditions relating to the mines (American Antiquarian, 23-258). I think we've had visitors: that they have come here for copper, for instance. As to other relics of them--but we now come upon frequency of a merger that has not so often appeared before:

Fraudulency.

Hair called real hair--then there are wigs. Teeth called real teeth--then there are false teeth. Official money--counterfeit money. It's the bane of psychic research. If there be psychic phenomena, there must be fraudulent psychic phenomena. So desperate is the situation here that Carrington argues that, even if Palladino be caught cheating, that is not to say that all her phenomena are fraudulent. My own version is: that nothing, indicates anything, in a positive sense, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to be indicated. Everything that is called true must merge away indistinguishably into something called false. Both are expressions of the same underlying quasiness, and are continuous. Fraudulent antiquarian relics are very common, but they are not more common than are fraudulent paintings.

W. S. Forest, "Historical Sketches of Norfolk, Virginia":

That, in Sept., 1833, when some workmen, near Norfolk, were boring for water, a coin was drawn up from a depth of about 30 feet. It was about the size of an English shilling, but oval--an oval disk, if not a coin. The figures upon it were distinct, and represented "a warrior or hunter and other characters, apparently of Roman origin."

This means of exclusion would probably be--men digging a hole--no one else looking: one of them drops a coin into the hole--as to where he got a strange coin, remarkable in shape even--that's disregarded. Up comes the coin--expressions of astonishment from the evil one who had dropped it.

However, the antiquarians have missed this coin. I can find no other mention of it.

Another coin. Also a little study in the genesis of a prophet.

In the American Antiquarian, 16-313, is copied a story by a correspondent to the Detroit News, of a copper coin about the size of a two-cent piece, said to have been found in a Michigan mound. The Editor says merely that he does not endorse the find. Upon this slender basis, he buds out, in the next number of the Antiquarian:

"The coin turns out, as we predicted, to be a fraud."

You can imagine the scorn of Elijah, or any of the old more nearly real prophets.

Or all things are tried by the only kind of jurisprudence we have in quasi-existence:

Presumed to be innocent until convicted--but they're guilty.

The Editor's reasoning is as phantom-like as my own, or St. Paul's, or Darwin's. The coin is condemned because it came from the same region from which, a few years before, had come pottery that had been called fraudulent. The pottery had been condemned because it was condemnable.

Scientific American, June 17, 1882:

That a farmer, in Cass Co., Ill., had picked up, on his farm, a bronze coin, which was sent to Prof. F.F. Hilder, of St. Louis, who identified it as a coin of Antiochus IV. Inscription said to be in ancient Greek characters: translated as "King Antiochus, Epiphanes (Illustrious) the Victorious." Sounds quite definite and convincing--but we have some more translations coming.

In the American Pioneer, 2-169, are shown two faces of a copper coin, with characters very much like those upon the Grave Creek stone--which, with translations, we'll take up soon. This coin is said to have been found in Connecticut, in 1843.

"Records of the Past," 12-182:

That, early in 1913, a coin, said to be a Roman coin, was reported as discovered in an Illinois mound. It was sent to Dr. Emerson, of the Art Institute, of Chicago. His opinion was that the coin is "of the rare mintage of Domitius Domitianus, Emperor in Egypt." As to its discovery in an Illinois mound, Dr. Emerson disclaims responsibility. But what strikes me here is that a joker should not have been satisfied with an ordinary Roman coin. Where did he get a rare coin, and why was it not missed from some collection? I have looked over numismatic journals enough to accept that the whereabouts of every rare coin in anyone's possession is known to coin-collectors. Seems to me nothing left but to call this another "identification."

Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., 12-224:

That, in July, 1871, a letter was received from Mr. Jacob W. Moffit, of Chillicothe, Ill., enclosing a photograph of a coin, which he said had been brought up, by him, while boring, from a depth of 120 feet.

Of course, by conventional scientific standards, such depth has some extraordinary meaning. Paleontologists, geologists, and archæologists consider themselves reasonable in arguing ancient origin of the far-buried. We only accept: depth is a pseudo-standard with us; one earthquake could bury a coin of recent mintage 120 feet below the surface.

According to a writer in the Proceedings, the coin is uniform in thickness, and had never been hammered out by savages--"there are other tokens of the machine shop."

But, according to Prof. Leslie, it is an astrologic amulet. "There are upon it the signs of Pisces and Leo."

Or, with due disregard, you can find signs of your great grandmother, or of the Crusades, or of the Mayans, upon anything that ever came from Chillicothe or from the five and ten cent store. Anything that looks like a cat and a goldfish looks like Leo and Pisces; but, by due suppressions and distortions there's nothing that can't be made to look like a cat and a goldfish. I fear me we're turning a little irritable here. To be damned by slumbering giants and interesting harlots and clowns who rank high in their profession is at least supportable to our vanity; but, we find that the anthropologists are of the slums of the divine, or of an archaic kindergarten of intellectuality, and it is very unflattering to find a mess of moldy infants sitting in judgment upon us.

Prof. Leslie then finds, as arbitrarily as one might find that some joker put the Brooklyn Bridge where it is, that "the piece was placed there as a practical joke, though not by its present owner; and is a modern fabrication; perhaps of the sixteenth century; possibly Hispano-American or French-American origin."

It's sheer, brutal attempt to assimilate a thing that may or may not have fallen from the sky, with the phenomena admitted by the anthropologic system: or with the early French or Spanish explorers of Illinois. Though it is ridiculous in a positive sense, to give reasons, it is more acceptable to attempt reasons more nearly real than opposing reasons. Of course, in his favor, we note that Prof. Leslie qualifies his notions. But his disregards are that there is nothing either French or Spanish about this coin. A legend upon it is said to be "somewhere between Arabic and Phoenician, without being either." Prof. Winchell (Sparks from a Geologist's Hammer, p. 170) says of the crude designs upon this coin, which was in his possession--scrawls of an animal and of a warrior, or of a cat and a goldfish, whichever be convenient--that they had been neither stamped nor engraved, but "looked as if etched with acid." That is a method unknown in numismatics of this earth. As to the crudity of design upon this coin, and something else--that, though the "warrior" may be, by due disregards, either a cat or a goldfish, we have to note that his headdress is typical of the American Indian--could be explained, of course, but for fear that we might be instantly translated to the Positive Absolute, which may not be absolutely desirable, we prefer to have some flaws or negativeness in our own expressions.

Data of more than the thrice-accursed:

Tablets of stone, with ten commandments engraved upon them, in Hebrew, said to have been found in the mounds in the United States;

Masonic emblems said to have been found in the mounds in the United States.

We're upon the borderline of our acceptances, and we're amorphous in the uncertainties and mergings of our outline. Conventionally, or, with no real reason for doing so, we exclude these things, and then, as grossly and arbitrarily and irrationally--though our attempt is always to approximate away from the negative states--as ever a Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, made his selections, without which he could not have seemed to be, at all, because every one of them is now seen to be an illusion, we accept that other lettered things have been found in mounds in the United States. Of course we do what we can to make the selection seem not gross and arbitrary and irrational. Then, if we accept that inscribed things of ancient origin have been found in the United States; that can not be attributed to any race indigenous to the western hemisphere; that are not in any [145/146] language ever heard of in the eastern hemisphere--there's nothing to it but to turn non-Euclidean and try to conceive of a third "hemisphere," or to accept that there has been intercourse between the western hemisphere and some other world.

But there is a peculiarity to these inscribed objects. They remind me of the records left, by Sir John Franklin, in the Arctic; but, also, of attempts made by relief expeditions to communicate with the Franklin expedition. The lost explorers cached their records--or concealed them conspicuously in mounds. The relief expeditions sent up balloons, from which messages were dropped broadcast. Our data are of things that have been cached, and of things that seem to have been dropped--

Or a Lost Expedition--Somewhere.

Explorers from somewhere, and their inability to return--then, a long, sentimental, persistent attempt, in the spirit of our own Arctic relief-expeditions--at least to establish communication--

What if it may have succeeded?

We think of India--millions of natives who are ruled by a small band of esoterics--only because they receive support and direction from--somewhere else--or from England.

In 1838, Mr. A.B. Tomlinson, owner of the great mound at Grave Creek, West Virginia, excavated the mound. He said that, in the presence of witnesses, he had found a small, flat, oval stone--or disk--upon which were engraved alphabetic characters.

Col. Whittelsey, an expert in these matters, says that the stone is now "universally regarded by archæologists as a fraud": that, in his opinion, Mr. Tomlinson had been imposed upon.

Avebury, Prehistoric Times, p. 271:

"I mention it because it has been the subject of much discussion, but it is now generally admitted to be a fraud. It is inscribed with Hebrew characters, but the forger has copied the modern instead of the ancient forms of the letters."

As I have said, we're as irritable here, under the oppressions of the anthropologists as ever were the slaves in the south toward superiorities from "poor white trash." When we finally reverse our relative positions we shall give lowest place to the anthropologists. A Dr. Gray does at least look at a fish before he conceives of a miraculous origin for it. We shall have to submerge Lord Avebury far below him--if we accept that the stone from Grave Creek is generally regarded as a fraud by eminent authorities who did not know it from some other object--or, in general, that so decided an opinion must be the product of either deliberate disregard or ignorance or fatigue. The stone belongs to a class of phenomena that is repulsive to the System. It will not assimilate with the System. Let such an object be heard of by such a systematist as Avebury, and the mere mention of it is as nearly certainly the stimulus to a conventional reaction as is a charged body to an electroscope or a glass of beer to a prohibitionist. It is of the ideals of Science to know one object from another before expressing an opinion upon a thing, but that is not the spirit of universal mechanics:

A thing. It is attractive or repulsive. Its conventional reaction follows.

Because it is not the stone from Grave Creek that is in Hebrew characters, either ancient nor modern: it is a stone from Newark, Ohio, of which the story is told that a forger made this mistake of using modern instead of ancient Hebrew characters. We shall see that the inscription upon the Grave Creek stone is not in Hebrew.

Or all things are presumed to be innocent, but supposed to be guilty--unless they assimilate.

Col. Whittelsey, (Western Reserve Historical Tracts, no. 33) says that the Grave Creek stone was considered a fraud by Wilson, Squires, and Davis. Then he comes to the Congress of Archæologists at Nancy, France, 1875. It is hard for Col. Whittelsey to admit that, at this meeting, which sounds important, the stone was endorsed. He reminds us of Mr. Symons, and "the man" who "considered" that he saw something. Col. Whittelsey's somewhat tortured expression is that the finder of the stone "so imposed his views" upon the congress that it pronounced the stone genuine.

Also the stone was examined by Schoolcraft. He gave his opinion for genuineness.

Or there's only one process, and "see-saw" is one of its aspects. Three of four fat experts on the side against us. We find four or five plump ones on our side. Or all that we call logic and reasoning ends up as sheer preponderance of avoirdupois.

Then several philologists came out in favor of genuineness. Some of them translated the inscription. Of course, as we have said, it is our method--or the method of orthodoxy--way in which all conclusions are reached--to have some awfully eminent, or preponderantly plump, authorities with us whenever we can--in this case, however, we feel just a little apprehensive in being caught in such excellently obese, but somewhat negativized, company:

Translation by M. Jombard:

"Thy orders are laws: thou shinest in impetuous élan and rapid chamois."

M. Maurice Schwab:

"The chief of Emigration who reached these places (or this island) has fixed these characters forever."

M. Oppert:

"The grave of one who was assassinated here. May God, to revenge him, strike his murderer, cutting off the hand of his existence."

I like the first one best. I have such a vivid impression from it of someone polishing up brass or something, and in an awful hurry. Of course the third is more dramatic--still they're all very good. They are perturbations of one another, I suppose.

In Tract 44, Whittelsey returns to the subject. He gives the conclusion of Major De Helward, at the Congress of Luxembourg, 1877:

"If Professor Read and myself are right in the conclusion that the figures are neither of the Runic, Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Lybian, Celtic, or any other alphabet-language, its importance has been greatly over-rated."

Obvious to a child; obvious to any mentality not helplessly subjected to a system:

That just therein lies the importance of this object.

It is said that an ideal of science is find out the new--but, unless a thing be of the old, it is "unimportant."

"It is not worth while." (Hovey.)

Then the inscribed ax, or wedge, which, according to Dr. John C. Evans, in a communication to the American Ethnological Society, was plowed up, near Pemberton, N.J., 1859. The characters upon this ax, or wedge, are strikingly similar to the characters on the Grave Creek stone. Also, with a little disregard here and a little more there, they look like tracks in the snow by someone who's been out celebrating, or like your handwriting, or mine, when we think there's a certain distinction in illegibility. Method of disregard: anything's anything.

Dr. Abbott describes this object in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1875-260.

He says he has no faith in it.

All progress is from the outrageous to the commonplace. Or quasi-existence proceeds from rape to the crooning of lullabies. It's been interesting to me to go over various long-established periodicals and note controversies between attempting positivists, and then intermediatistic issues. Bold, bad intruders of theories; ruffians with dishonorable intentions--the alarms of Science; her attempt to preserve that which is dearer than life itself--submission--then a fidelity like Mrs. Micawber's. So many of these ruffians, or wandering comedians that were hated, or scorned, pitied, embraced, conventionalized. There's not a notion in this book that has a more frightful, or ridiculous, mien than had the notion of human footprints in rocks, when that now respectabilized ruffian, or clown, was first heard from. It seems bewildering to one whose interests are not scientific that such rows should be raised over such trifles: but the feeling of a systematist toward such an intruder is just about what anyone's would be if a tramp from the street should come in, sit at one's dinner table, and say he belonged there. We know what hypnosis can do: let him insist with all his might that he does belong there, and one begins to suspect that he may be right; that he may have higher perceptions of what's right. The prohibitionists had this worked out very skillfully.

So the row that was raised over the stone from Grave Creek--but time and cumulativeness, and the very factor we make so much of--or the power of massed data. There were other reports of inscribed stones, and then, half a century later, some mounds--or caches, as we call them--were opened by the Rev. Mr. Gass, near the city of Davenport. (American Antiquarian, 15-73.) Several stone tablets were found. Upon one of them, the letters "TFTOWNS" may easily be made out. In this instance we hear nothing of fraudulency--time, cumulativeness, the power of massed data. The attempt to assimilate this datum is:

That the tablet was probably of Mormon origin.

Why?

Because, at Mendon, Illinois, was found a brass plate, upon which were similar characters.

Why that?

Because that was found "near a house once occupied by a Mormon."

In a real existence, a real meteorologist, suspecting that cinders had come from a fire engine--would have asked a fireman.

Tablets of Davenport--there's not a record findable that it ever occurred to any antiquarian--to ask a Mormon.

Other tablets were found. Upon one of them are two "F's" and two "8's." Also a large tablet, twelve inches by eight to ten inches "with Roman numerals and Arabic." It is said that the figure "8" occurs three times, and the figure, or letter "O" seven times. "With these familiar characters are others that resemble ancient alphabets, either Phoenecian or Hebrew."

It may be that the discovery of Australia, for instance, will turn out to be less important than the discovery and the meaning of these tablets--

But where will you read of them in anything subsequently published; what antiquarian has ever since tried to understand them, and their presence, and indications of antiquity, in a land that we're told was inhabited only by unlettered savages?

These things that are exhumed only to be buried in some other way.

Another tablet was found, at Davenport, by Mr. Charles Harrison, president of the American Antiquarian Society. "...8 and other hieroglyphics are upon this tablet." This time, also, fraud is not mentioned. My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike ever to mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way. Anything that assimilates with one explanation, must have assimilable relations, to some degree, with all other explanations, if all explanations are somewhat continuous. Mormons are lugged in again, but the attempt is faint and helpless--"because general circumstances make it difficult to explain the presence of these tablets."

Altogether our phantom resistance is mere attribution to the Mormons, without the slightest attempt to find base for the attribution. We think of messages that were showered upon this earth, and of messages that were cached in the mounds upon this earth. The similarity to the Franklin situation is striking. Conceivably centuries from now, objects dropped from relief-expedition-balloons may be found in the Arctic, and conceivably there are still undiscovered caches left by Franklin, in the hope that relief expeditions would find them. It would be as incongruous to attribute these things to the Eskimos as to attribute tablets and lettered stones to the aborigines of America. Some time I shall take up an expression that the queer-shaped mounds upon this earth were built by explorers from Somewhere, unable to get back, designed to attract the attention from some other world, and that a vast sword-shaped mound has been discovered upon the moon--Just now we think of lettered things and their two possible significances.

A bizarre little lost soul, rescued from one of the morgues of the American Journal of Science:

An account, sent by a correspondent, to Prof. Silliman, of something that was found in a block of marble, taken Nov., 1829, from a quarry, near Philadelphia (Am. J. Sci., 1-19-361). The block was cut into slabs. By this process, it is said, was exposed an indentation in the stone, about one-and-a-half inches by five-eighths of an inch. A geometric indentation: in it were two definite-looking raised letters, like "I U": only difference is that the corners of the "U" are not rounded, but are right angles. We are told that this block of stone came from a depth of seventy to eighty feet--or that, if acceptable, this lettering was done long, long ago. To some persons, not sated with the commonness of the incredible that has to be accepted, it may seem grotesque to think that an indentation in sand could have tons of other sand piled upon it and hardening into stone, without being pressed out--but the famous Nicaraguan footprints were found in a quarry under eleven strata of solid rock. There was no discussion of this datum. We only take it out for an airing.

As to lettered stones that may once upon a time have been showered upon Europe, if we cannot accept that stones were inscribed by indigenous inhabitants of Europe, many have been found in caves--whence they were carried as curiosities by prehistoric men, or as ornaments, I suppose. About the size and shape of the Grave Creek stone, or disk: "flat and oval and about two inches wide." (Sollas.) Characters painted upon them: found first by M. Piette in the cave of Mas d'Azil, Ariége. According to Sollas, they are marked in various directions with red and black lines. "But on not a few of them, more complex characters occur, which in a few instances simulate some of the capital letters of the Roman alphabet." In one instance the letters "F E I" accompanied by no other markings to modify them, are as plain as they could be. According to Sollas ("Ancient Hunters," p. 95) M. Cartailhac has confirmed the observations of Piette, and M. Boule has found additional examples. "They offer one of the darkest problems of prehistoric times." (Sollas.)

As to caches in general, I should say that they are made with two purposes: to proclaim and to conceal; or that caches documents are hidden, or covered over, in conspicuous structures; at least, so are designed the cairns in the Arctic.

Trans N. Y. Acad. of Sciences, 11-27:

That Mr. J.H. Hooper, Bradley Co., Tenn., having come upon a curious stone, in some woods upon his farm, investigated. He dug. He unearthed a long wall. Upon this wall were inscribed many alphabetic characters. "872 characters have been examined, many of them duplicates, and a few imitations of animal forms, the moon, and other objects. Accidental imitation of oriental alphabets are numerous."

The part that seems significant:

That these letters had been hidden under a layer of cement.

And still, in our own heterogeneity, or unwillingness, or inability, to concentrate upon single concepts, we shall--or we shan't--accept that, though there may have been a Lost Colony or Lost Expedition from Somewhere, upon this earth, and extra-mundane visitors who could never get back, there have been other extra-mundane visitors, who have gone away again--altogether quite in analogy with the Franklin expedition and Peary's flittings in the Arctic--

And a wreck that occurred to one group of them--

And the loot that was lost overboard--

The Chinese seals of Ireland.

Not the things with the big, wistful eyes; that lie on the ice, and that are taught to balance objects on their noses--but inscribed stamps, with which to make impressions.

Proc. Roy. Irish Acad., 1-381:

A paper was read by Mr. J. Huband Smith, descriptive of about a dozen Chinese seals that had been found in Ireland. They are all alike: each a cube with an animal seated upon it. "It is said that the inscriptions upon them are of a very ancient class of Chinese characters."

The three points that have been made a leper and an outcast of this datum--but only in the sense of disregard, because nowhere that I know of is it questioned--:

Agreement among archæologists that there were no relations, in the remote past, between China and Ireland;

That no other objects, from ancient China--virtually, I suppose--have ever been found in Ireland;

The great distances at which these seals have been found apart.

After Mr. Smith's investigations--if he did investigate, or do more than record--many more Chinese seals were found in Ireland, and, with one exception, only in Ireland. In 1852, about 60 had been found. Of all archæologic finds in Ireland, "none are enveloped in greater mystery." (Chambers' Journal, 16-364.) According to the writer in Chambers' Journal, one of these seals was found in a curiosity shop in London. When questioned, the shopkeeper said that it had come from Ireland.

In this instance, if you don't take instinctively to our expression, there is no orthodox explanation for your preference. It is the astonishing scattering of them, over field and forest, that has hushed the explainers. In the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 10-171, Dr. Frazer says that they "appear to have been sown broadcast over the country in some strange way that I cannot offer solution of."

The struggle for expression of a notion that did not belong to Dr. Frazer's era:

"The invariable story of their find is what we might expect if they had been accidentally dropped...."

Three were found in Tipperary; six in Cork; three in Down; four in Waterford; all the rest--one or two to a county.

But one of these Chinese seals was found in the bed of the River Boyne, near Clonard, Meath, when workmen were raising gravel.

That one, at least, had been dropped there.

Book of the Damned Chapter XII

ASTRONOMY.

And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where a street's been torn up.

There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in the neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs --

The watchman and his one little system.

Ethics.

And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a very "select" seminary.

Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness, murder --

Excluded.

The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have illusion of this state--but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The positive swamped by the negative. So it is in intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening consciousness of a real existence.

But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to efforts to realize or to become real--because it is feeling that realness has been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the attitude of the sciences that they have finally realized; or to belief, instead of acceptance; to the insufficiency, which, as we have seen over and over, amounts to paltriness and puerility, of scientific dogmas and standards. Or, if several persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the others.

So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system --

But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel --

Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and coke and charcoal and oily substances that suggest fuel--but the masses of iron that have fallen upon this earth.

Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constructions --

Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an expression that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments not of iron, but of steel, have fallen upon this earth --

But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?

Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density.

Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

The greatest of mysteries:

Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly?

Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so seriously the notion--that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral reasons that they stay away--but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.

Or physical reasons:

When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading ideas, or credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that others that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses, or orbits which approximate to regularity, though by no means to the degree of popular supposition.

But the persistence of the notion that we must be interesting. Bugs and germs and things like that: they're interesting to us: some of them are too interesting.

Dangers of near approach--nevertheless our own ships that dare not venture close onto a rocky shore can send rowboats ashore --

Why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea--which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes made in selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African chief to some one's old silk hat from New York or London?

The answer that occurs to me is so simple that it seems immediately acceptable, if we accept that the obvious is the solution of all problems, or if most of our perplexities consist in laboriously and painfully conceiving of the unanswerable, and then looking for answers--using such words as "obvious" and "solution" conventionally --

Or:

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?

Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?

I think we're property.

I should say we belong to something:

That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:

That something owns this earth--all others warned off.

Nothing in our own times--perhaps--because I am thinking of certain notes I have--has ever appeared upon this earth, from somewhere else, so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador, or as Hudson sailed up his river. But as to surreptitious visits to this earth, in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to evade or avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions.

But, in this vast subject, I shall have to do considerable neglecting or disregarding, myself. I don't see how I can, in this book, take up all the subject of possible use of humanity to some other mode of existence, or the flattering notion that we can possibly be worth something.

Pigs, geese, cattle.

First find out they are owned.

Then find out the whyness of it.

I suspect that, after all, we're useful--that among contesting claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us--all others warned off--that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received--from Somewhere else--in our mysterious usefulness.

But I accept that, in the past, before proprietorship was established, inhabitants of a host of other worlds have--dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored--walked here, for all I know--been pulled here, been pushed; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited occasionally, have visited periodically for hunting, trading, replenishing harems, mining: have been unable to stay here, have established colonies here, have been lost here; far-advanced peoples, or things, and primitive peoples or whatever they were: white ones, black ones, yellow ones --

I have a very convincing datum that the ancient Britons were blue ones.

Of course we are told by conventional anthropologists that they only painted themselves blue, but in our own advanced anthropology, they were veritable blue ones --

Annals of Philosophy, 14-51:

Note of a blue child born in England.

That's atavism.

Giants and fairies. We accept them, of course. Or, if we pride ourselves upon being awfully far-advanced, I don't know how to sustain our conceit except by very largely going far back. Science of to-day--the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow--the superstition of to-day.

Notice of a stone ax, 17 inches long: 9 inches across broad end, (Proc. Soc. Ants. of Scotland, 1-9-184).

American Antiquarian, 18-60:

Copper ax from an Ohio mound: 22 inches long; weight 38 pounds.

American Anthropologist, n.s., 8-229:

Stone ax found at Birchwood, Wisconsin--exhibited in the collection of the Missouri Historical Society--found with "the pointed end" embedded in the soil--for all I know, may have dropped there--28 inches long, 14 wide, 11 thick--weight over 300 pounds.

Of the footprints, in sandstone, near Carson, Nevada--each print 18 to 20 inches long. (Amer. Jour. Sci., 3-26-139.)

These footprints are very clear and well-defined: reproduction of them in the Journal--but they assimilate with the System, like sour apples to other systems: so Prof. Marsh, a loyal and unscrupulous systematist, argues:

"The size of these footprints and specially the width between the right and left series are strong evidence that they were not made by men, as has been so generally supposed."

So these excluders. Stranglers of Minerva. Desperadoes of disregard. Above all, or below all, the anthropologists. I'm inspired with a new insult--some one offends me: I wish to express almost absolute contempt for him--he's a systematistic anthropologist. Simply to read something of this kind is not so impressive as to see for one's self: if any one will take the trouble to look up these footprints, as pictured in the Journal, he will either agree with Prof. Marsh or feel that to deny them is to indicate a mind as profoundly enslaved by a system as was ever the humble intellect of a medieval monk. The reasoning of this representative phantom of the chosen, or of the spectral appearances who sit in judgment, or condemnation, upon us of the more nearly real:

That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not giants.

We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of course--Stonehenge, for instance. It may be that, as time goes on, we shall have to admit that there are remains of many tremendous habitations of giants upon this earth, and that their appearances here were more than casual--but their bones--or the absence of their bones --

Except--that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my disposition may be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History, dark cynicisms arise the moment I come to the fossils--or old bones that have been found upon this earth--gigantic things--that have been reconstructed into terrifying but "proper" dinosaurs--but my uncheerfulness --

The dodo did it.

On one of the floors below the fossils, they have reconstructed dodo. It's frankly a fiction: it's labeled as such--but it's been reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly --

Fairies.

"Fairy crosses."

Harper's Weekly, 50-715:

That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have been found.

A race of tiny beings.

They crucified cockroaches.

Exquisite beings--but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their diminutive way they were human beings. They crucified.

The "fairy crosses," we are told in Harper's Weekly, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in the Scientific American, 79-395, that some of them are no larger than the head of a pin.

They have been found in two other states, but all in Virginia are strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain.

We are reminded of the Chinese seals in Ireland.

I suppose they fell there.

Some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese. This time we are spared contact with the anthropologists and have geologists instead, but I am afraid that the relief to our finer, or more nearly real, sensibilities will not be very great. The geologists were called upon to explain the "fairy crosses." Their response was the usual tropism--"Geologists say they are crystals." The writer in Harper's Weekly points out that this "hold up," or this anæsthetic, if theoretic science be little but attempt to assuage pangs of the unexplained, fails to account for the localized distributions of these objects--which make me think of both aggregation and separation at the bottom of the sea, if from a wrecked ship, similar objects should fall in large numbers but at different times.

But some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese.

Conceivably there might be a mineral that would have a diversity of geometric forms, at the same time restricted to the expression of the cross, because snowflakes, for instance, have diversity but restriction to the hexagon, but the guilty geologists, cold-blooded as astronomers and chemists and all the other deep-sea fishes--though less profoundly of the pseudo-saved than the wretched anthropologists--disregarded the very datum--that it was wise to disregard:

That the "fairy crosses" are not all made of the same material.

It's the same old disregard, or it's the same old psycho-tropism, or process of assimilation. Crystals are geometric forms. Crystals are included in the System. So then "fairy crosses" are crystals. But that different minerals should, in a few different regions, be inspired to turn into different forms of the cross--is the kind of resistance that we call less nearly real than our own acceptances.

We now come to some "cursed" little things that are of the "lost," but for the "salvation" of which scientific missionaries have done their dam-dest.

"Pigmy flints."

They can't very well be denied.

They're lost and well known.

"Pigmy flints" are tiny, prehistoric implements. Some of them are a quarter of an inch in size. England, India, France, South Africa--they've been found in many parts of the world--whether showered there or not. They belong high up in the froth of the accursed: they are not denied, and they have not been disregarded; there is an abundant literature upon this subject. One attempt to rationalize them, or assimilate them, or take them into the scientific fold, has been the notion that they were toys of prehistoric children. It sounds reasonable. But, of course, by the reasonable we mean that for which the equally reasonable, but opposing, has not been found out--except that we modify that by saying that, though nothing's finally reasonable, some phenomena have higher approximations to Reasonableness than have others. Against the notion of toys, the higher approximation is that where "pigmy flints" are found, all flints are pigmies--at least so in India, where, when larger implements have been found in the same place, there are separations by strata. (Wilson.)

The datum that, just at present, leads me to accept that these flints were made by beings about the size of pickles, is a point brought out by Prof. Wilson (Rept. National Museum, 1892-455):

Not only that the flints are tiny but that the chipping upon them is "minute."

Struggle for expression, in the mind of a 19th-century-ite, of an idea that did not belong to his era:

In Science Gossip, 1896-36, R. A. Gatty says:

"So fine is the chipping that to see the workmanship a magnifying glass is necessary."

I think that would be absolutely convincing, if there were anything--absolutely anything--either that tiny beings, from pickle to cucumber stature made these things, or that ordinary savages made them under magnifying glasses.

The idea that we are now going to develop, or perpetrate, is rather intensely of the accursed, or the advanced. It's a lost soul, I admit--or boast--but it fits in. Or, as conventional as ever, our ownmethod is the scientific method of assimilating. It assimilates, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera --

By the way, I forgot to tell the name of the giant's world:

Monstrator.

Spindle-shaped world--about 100,000 miles along its major axis--more details to be published later.

But our coming inspiration fits in, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera as having only visited here: having, in hordes as dense as clouds of bats, come here, upon hunting excursions--for mice, I should say: for bees, very likely--or most likely of all, or inevitably, to convert the heathen--horrified with any one who would gorge himself with more than a bean at a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle more than a dew drop at a time--hordes to tiny missionaries, determined that right should prevail, determining right by their own minutenesses.

They must have been missionaries.

Only to be is motion to convert or assimilate something else.

The idea now is that tiny creatures coming here from their own little world, which may be Eros, though I call it Elvera, would flit from the exquisite to the enormous--gulp of a fair-sized terrestrial animal--half a dozen of them gone and soon digested. One falls into a brook--torn away in a mighty torrent --

Or never anything but conventional, we adopt from Darwin:

"The geological records are incomplete."

Their flints would survive, but, as to their fragile bodies--one might as well search for prehistoric frost-traceries. A little whirlwind--Elverean carried away a hundred yards--body never found by his companions. They'd mourn for the departed. Conventional emotion to have: they'd mourn. There'd have to be a funeral: there's no getting away from funerals. So I adopt an explanation that I take from the anthropologists: burial in effigy. Perhaps the Elvereans would not come to this earth again until many years later--another distressing occurrence--one little mausoleum for all burials in effigy.

London Times, July 20, 1836:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits' burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out.

Little cave.

Seventeen tiny coffins.

Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently both in style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third tier begun, with one coffin.

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:

That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the effects of age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite recent-looking.

In the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland, 3-12-460, there is a full account of this find. Three of the coffins and three of the figures are pictured.

So Elvera with its downy forests and its microscopic oyster shells--and if the Elvereans be not very far-advanced, they take baths--with sponges the size of pin-heads --

Or that catastrophes have occurred: that fragments of Elvera have fallen to this earth:

In Popular Science, 20-83, Francis Bingham, writing of the corals and sponges and shells and crinoids that Dr. Hahn had asserted that he had found in meteorites, says, judging by the photographs of them, that their "notable peculiarity" is their "extreme smallness." The corals, for instance, are about one-twentieth the size of terrestrial corals. "They represent a veritable pigmy animal kingdom," says Bingham.

The inhabitants of Monstrator and Elvera were primitives, I think, at the time of their occasional visits to this earth--though, of course, in a quasi-existence, anything that we semi-phantoms call evidence of anything may be just as good evidence of anything else. Logicians and detectives and jurymen and suspicious wives and members of the Royal Astronomical Society recognize this indeterminateness, but have the delusion that in the method of agreement there is final, or real evidence. The method is good enough for an "existence" that is only semi-real, but also it is the method of reasoning by which witches were burned, and by which ghosts have been feared. I'd not like to be so unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts, but I do think that there never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition. But stories of them have been supported by astonishing fabrications of details and of different accounts in agreement.

So, if a giant left impressions of his bare feet in the ground, that is not to say that he was a primitive--bulk of culture out taking the Kneipp cure. So, if Stonehenge is a large, but only roughly geometric construction, the inattention to details by its builders--signifies anything you please--ambitious dwarfs or giants--if giants, that they were little more than cave men, or that they were post-impressionist architects from a very far-advanced civilization.

If there are other worlds, there are tutelary worlds--or that Kepler, for instance, could not have been absolutely wrong: that his notion of an angel assigned to push along and guide each planet may not be very acceptable, but that, abstractedly, or in the notion of a tutelary relation, we may find acceptance.

Only to be is to be tutelary.

Our general expression:

That "everything" in Intermediateness is not a thing, but is an endeavor to become something--by breaking away from its continuity, or merging away, with all other phenomena--is an attempt to break away from the very essence of a relative existence and become absolute--if it have not surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt:

That to this process there are two aspects:

Attraction, or the spirit of everything to assimilate all other things--if it have not given in or subordinated to--or have not been assimilated by--some higher attempted system, unity, organization, entity, harmony, equilibrium --

And repulsion, or the attempt of everything to exclude or disregard the unassimilable.

Universality of the process:

Anything conceivable:

A tree. It is doing all it can to assimilate substances of the soil and substances of the air, and sunshine, too, into tree-substance: obversely it is rejecting or excluding or disregarding that which it cannot assimilate.

Cow grazing, pig rooting, tiger stalking: planets trying, or acting, to capture comets; rag pickers and the Christian religion, and a cat down headfirst in a garbage can; nations fighting for more territory, sciences correlating the data they can, trust magnates organizing, chorus girl out for a little late supper--all of them stopped somewhere by the unassimilable. Chorus girl and the broiled lobster. If she eats not shell and all she represents universal failure to positivize. Also, if she does she represents universal failure to positivize: her ensuing disorders will translate her to the Negative Absolute.

Or Science and some of our cursed hard-shelled data.

One speaks of the tutelarian as if it were something distinct in itself. So one speaks of a tree, a saint, a barrel of pork, the Rocky Mountains. One speaks of missionaries, as if they were positively different, or had an identity of their own, or were a species by themselves. To the Intermediatist, everything that seems to have identity is only attempted identity, and every species is continuous with all other species, or that which is called the specific is only emphasis upon some aspect of the general. If there are cats, they're only emphasis upon universal felinity. There is nothing that does not partake of that of which the missionary, or the tutelary, is the special. Every conversation is a conflict of missionaries, each trying to convert the other, to assimilate, or to make the other similar to himself. If no progress be made, mutual repulsion will follow.

If other worlds have ever in the past had relations with this earth, they were attempted positivizations: to extend themselves, by colonies, upon this earth; to convert, or assimilate, indigenous inhabitants of this earth.

Or parent-worlds and their colonies here --

Super-Romanimus --

Or where the first Romans came from.

It's as good as the Romulus and Remus story.

Super-Israelimus --

Or that, despite modern reasoning upon this subject, there was once something that was super-parental to tutelary to early orientals.

Azuria, which was tutelary to the early Britons:

Azuria, whence came the blue Britons, whose descendants gradually diluting, like blueing in a wash-tub, where a faucet's turned on, have been most emphasized of sub-tutelarians, or assimilators ever since.

World that were once tutelarian worlds--before this earth became sole property of one of them--their attempts to convert or assimilate--but then the state that comes to all things in their missionary-frustrations--unacceptance by all stomachs of some things; rejection by all societies of some units; glaciers that sort over and cast out stones --

Repulsion. Wrath of the baffled missionary. There is not other wrath. All repulsion is reaction to the unassimilable.

So then the wrath of Azuria --

Because surrounding peoples of this earth would not assimilate with her own colonists in the part of the earth that we now call England.

I don't know that there has ever been more nearly just, reasonable, or logical wrath, in this earth's history--if there is no other wrath.

The wrath of Azuria, because the other peoples of this earth would not turn blue to suit her.

History is a department of human delusion that interests us. We are able to give a little advancement to history. In the vitrified forts of a few parts of Europe, we find data that the Humes and Gibbons have disregarded.

The vitrified forts surrounding England, but not in England.

The vitrified forts of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.

Or that, once upon a time, with electric blasts, Azuria tried to swipe this earth clear of the peoples who resisted her.

The vast blue bulk of Azuria appeared in the sky. Clouds turned green. The sun was formless and purple in the vibrations of wrath that were emanating from Azuria. The whitish, or yellowish, or brownish peoples of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia fled to hill tops and built forts. In a real existence, hill tops, or easiest accessibility to an aerial enemy, would be the last choice in refuges. But here, in quasi-existence, if we're accustomed to run to hill tops, in times of danger, we run to them just the same, even with danger closest to hill tops. Very common in quasi-existence: attempt to escape by running closer to the pursuing.

They built forts, or already had forts, on hill tops.

Something poured electricity upon them.

The stones of these forts exist to this day, vitrified, or melted and turned to glass.

The archæologists have jumped from one conclusion to another, like the "rapid chamois" we read of a while ago, to account for vitrified forts, always restricted by the commandment that unless their conclusions conformed to such tenets as Exclusionism, of the System, they would be excommunicated. So archæologists, in their medieval dread of excommunication, have tried to explain vitrified forts in terms of terrestrial experience. We find in their insufficiencies the same old assimilating of all that could be assimilated, and disregard the unassimilable, conventionalizing into the explanation that vitrified forts were made by prehistoric peoples who built vast fires--often remote from wood-supply--to melt externally, and to cement together, the stones of their constructions. But negativeness always: so within itself a science can never be homogeneous or unified or harmonious. So Miss Russel, in the Journal of the B. A. A., has pointed out that it is seldom that single stones, to say nothing of long walls, of large houses that are burned to the ground, are vitrified.

If we pay a little attention to this subject, before starting to write upon it, which is one of the ways of being more nearly real than oppositions so far encountered by us, we find:

That the stones of these forts are vitrified in no reference to cementing them: that they are cemented here and there, in streaks, as if special blasts had struck, or played, upon them.

Then one thinks of lightning?

Once upon a time something melted, in streaks, the stones of forts on the tops of hills in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.

Lightning selects the isolated and conspicuous.

But some of the vitrified forts are not upon tops of hills: some are very inconspicuous: their walls too are vitrified in streaks.

Something once had effect, similar to lightning, upon forts, mostly on hills, in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.

But upon hills, all over the rest of the world, are remains of forts that are not vitrified.

There is only one crime, in the local sense, and that is not to turn blue, if the gods are blue: but, in the universal sense, the one crime is not to turn the gods themselves green, if you're green.

Book of the Damned Chapter XIII

ONE of the most extraordinary phenomena, or alleged phenomena, of psychic research, or alleged research--if in quasi-existence there never has been real research, but only approximations to research that merge away, or that are continuous with, prejudice and convenience--

"Stone-throwing."

It's attributed to poltergeists. They're mischievous spirits.

Poltergeists do not assimilate with our own present quasi-system, which is an attempt to correlate denied or disregarded data as phenomena of extra-telluric forces, expressed in physical terms. Therefore I regard poltergeists as evil or false or discordant or absurd--names that we give to various degrees or aspects of the unassimilable, or that which resists attempts to organize, harmonize, systematize, or, in short, to positivize--names that we give to our recognition of the negative state. I don't care to deny poltergeists, because I suspect that later, when we're more enlightened, or when we widen the range of our credulities, or take on more of that increase of ignorance that is called knowledge, poltergeists may become assimilable. Then they'll be as reasonable as trees. By reasonableness I mean that which assimilates with a dominant force, or system, or a major body of thought--which is, itself, of course, hypnosis and delusion--developing, however, in our acceptance, to higher and higher approximations to realness. The poltergeists are now evil or absurd to me, proportionately to their present unassimilableness, compounded, however, with the factor of their possible future assimilableness.

We lug in the poltergeists, because some of our own data, or alleged data, merge away indistinguishably with data, or alleged data, of them:

Instances of stones that have been thrown, or that have fallen, upon a small area, from an unseen and undetectable source.

London Times, April 27, 1872:

"From 4 o'clock, Thursday afternoon until half-past eleven, Thursday night, the houses, 56 and 58 Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, were assailed with stones and other missiles coming from an unseen quarter. Two children were injured, every window was broken, and several articles of furniture were destroyed. Although there was a strong body of policemen scattered in the neighbourhood, they could not trace the direction whence the stones were thrown."

"Other missiles" make a complication here. But if the expression means tin cans and old shoes, and if we accept that the direction could not be traced because it never occurred to anyone to look upward--why we've lost a good deal of our provincialism by this time.

London Times, Sept. 16, 1841:

That, in the home of Mrs. Charton, at Sutton Courthouse, Sutton Lane, Chiswick, windows had been broken "by some unseen agent." Every attempt to detect the perpetrator failed. The mansion was detached and surrounded by high walls. No other building was near it.

The police were called. Two constables, assisted by members of the household, guarded the house, but the windows continued to be broken "both in front and behind the house."

Or the floating islands that are often stationary in the Super-Sargasso Sea; and atmospheric disturbances that sometimes affect them, and bring things down within small areas, upon this earth, from temporarily stationary sources.

Super-Sargasso Sea and the beaches of its floating islands from which I think, or at least accept, pebbles have fallen:

Wolverhampton, England, June, 1860--violent storm--fall of so many little black pebbles that they were cleared away by shoveling (La Sci. Pour Tous, 5-264); great number of small black stones that fell at Birmingham, England, Aug., 1858--violent storm--said to be similar to some basalt a few leagues from Birmingham (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1864-37); pebbles described as "common water-worn pebbles" that fell at Palestine, Texas, July 6, 1888--"of a formation not found near Palestine" (W. H. Perry, Sergeant, Signal Corps), Monthly Weather Review, July, 1888); round, smooth pebbles at Kandahor, 1834 (Am. J. Sci., 1-26-161); "a number of stones of peculiar formation and shapes, uncommon in this neighborhood fell in a tornado at Hillsboro, Ill., May 18, 1883." (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1883.)

Pebbles from aerial beaches and terrestrial pebbles as products of whirlwinds, so merge in these instances that, though it's interesting to hear of things of peculiar shape that have fallen from the sky, it seems best to pay little attention here, and to find phenomena of the Super-Sargasso Sea remote from the merger:

To this requirement we have three adaptations:

Pebbles that fell where no whirlwind to which to attribute them could be learned of;

Pebbles which fell in hail so large that incredibly could that hail have been formed in this earth's atmosphere;

Pebbles which fell and were, long afterward, followed by more pebbles, as if from some aerial, stationary source, in the same place.

In September, 1898, there was a story in a New York newspaper, of lightning--or an appearance of luminosity?--in Jamaica--something had struck a tree: near the tree were found some small pebbles. It was said that the pebbles had fallen from the sky, with the lightning. But the insult to orthodoxy was that they were not angular fragments such as might have been broken from a stony meteorite: that they were "water-worn pebbles."

In the geographical vagueness of a mainland, the explanation "up from one place and down in another" is always good, and is never overworked, until the instances are massed as they are in this book: but, upon this occasion, in the relatively small area of Jamaica, there was no whirlwind findable--however "there in the first place" bobs up.

Monthly Weather Review, Aug., 1898-363:

That the government meteorologist had investigated: had reported that a tree had been struck by lightning, and that small water-worn pebbles had been found near the tree: but that similar pebbles could be found all over Jamaica.

Monthly Weather Review, Sept., 1915-446:

Prof. Fassig gives an account of a fall of hail that occurred in Maryland, June 22, 1915: hailstones the size of baseballs "not at all uncommon."

"An interesting, but unconfirmed, account stated that small pebbles were found at the center of some of the larger hail gathered at Annapolis. The young man who related the story offered to produce the pebbles, but has not done so."

A footnote:

"Since writing this, the author states he has received some of the pebbles."

When a young man "produces" pebbles, that's as convincing as anything else I've ever heard of, though no more convincing than, if having told of ham sandwiches falling from the sky, he should "produce" ham sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted by us, we correlate it with a datum reported by a Weather Bureau observer, signifying that, whether the pebbles had been somewhere aloft a long time or not, some of the hailstones that fell with them, had been. The datum is that some of these hailstones were composed of from twenty to twenty-five layers alternately of clear ice and snow-ice. In orthodox terms I argue that a fair-sized hailstone falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to warm it so that it would not take on even one layer of ice. To put twenty layers of ice, I conceive of something that had not fallen at all, but had rolled somewhere, at a leisurely rate, for a long time.

We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two respects:

Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Sterlitamak, Orenburg, Russia, Sept., 1824 (Phil. Mag., 4-8-463).

A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25, 1825 (Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 1828-1-447).

I now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first I came upon these data I was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects of Orenburg were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of iron. I had no notion of metallic objects that might have been shaped or molded by means other than crystallization, until I came to Arago's account of these occurrences (Oeuvres, 11-644). Here the analysis gives 70 per cent red oxide of iron, and sulphur and loss by ignition 5 per cent. It seems to me acceptable that iron with considerably less than 5 per cent. sulphur in it is not iron pyrites--then little, rusty iron objects, shaped by some other means, have fallen, four months apart, at the same place. M. Arago expresses astonishment at this phenomenon of recurrence so familiar to us.

Altogether, I find opening before us, vistas of heresies to which I, for one, must shut my eyes. I have always been in sympathy with the dogmatists and exclusionists: that is plain in our opening lines: that to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude. It is only that exclusionists who are good in the nineteenth century are evil in the twentieth century. Constantly we feel a merging away into infinitude; but that this book shall approximate to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization, or that we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back constantly from wandering off into infinitude. The thing that we do, however, is to make our own outline, or the difference between what we include and what we exclude, vague.

The crux here, and the limit beyond which we may not go--very much--is:

Acceptance that there is a region that we call the Super-Sargasso Sea--not yet fully accepted, but a provisional position that has received a great deal of support--

But is it a part of this earth, and does it revolve with and over this earth--

Or does it flatly overlie this earth, not revolving with and over this earth--

That this earth does not revolve, and is not round, or roundish, at all, but is continuous with the rest of its system, so that, if one could break away from the traditions of the geographers, one might walk and walk, and come to Mars, and then find Mars continuous with Jupiter?

I suppose some day such queries will sound absurd--the thing will be so obvious--

Because it is very difficult for me to conceive of little metallic objects hanging precisely over a small town in Russia, for four months, if revolving, unattached, with a revolving earth--

It may be that something aimed at that town, and then later took another shot.

These are speculations that seem to me to be evil relatively to these early years in the twentieth century--

Just now, I accept that this earth is--not round, of course: that is very old-fashioned--but roundish, or, at least, that it has what is called form of its own, and does revolve upon its axis, and in an orbit around the sun. I only accept these old traditional notions--

And that above it are regions of suspension that revolve with it: from which objects fall, by disturbances of various kinds, and then, later, fall again, in the same place:

Monthly Weather Review, May, 1884-134:

Report from the Signal Service observer, at Bismarck, Dakota:

That, at 9 o'clock, in the evening of May 22, 1884, sharp sounds were heard throughout the city, caused by the fall of flinty stones striking against windows.

Fifteen hours later another fall of flinty stones occurred at Bismarck.

There is no report of stones having fallen anywhere else.

This is a thing of the ultra-damned. All Editors of scientific publications read the Monthly Weather Review and frequently copy from it. The noise made by the stones of Bismarck, rattling against those windows, may be in a language that aviators will some day interpret: but it was a noise entirely surrounded by silences. Of this ultra-damned thing, there is no mention, findable by me, in any other publication.

The size of some hailstones has worried many meteorologists--but not text-book meteorologists. I know of no more serene occupation than that of writing text-books--though writing for the War Cry, of the Salvation Army, may be equally unadventurous. In the drowsy tranquillity of a text-book, we easily and unintelligently read of dust particles around which icy rain forms, hailstones, in their fall, then increasing by accretion--but in the meteorological journals, we read often of air-spaces nucleating hailstones--

But it's the size of the things. Dip a marble in icy water. Dip and dip and dip it. If you're a resolute dipper, you will, after a while, have an object the size of a baseball--but I think a thing could fall from the moon in that length of time. Also the strata of them. The Maryland hailstones are unusual, but a dozen strata have often been counted. Ferrel gives an instance of thirteen strata. Such considerations led Prof. Schwedoff to argue that some hailstones are not, and can not, be generated in this earth's atmosphere--that they come from somewhere else. Now, in a relative existence, nothing can of itself be either attractive or repulsive: its effects are functions of its associations or implications. Many of our data have been taken from very conservative scientific sources: it was not until their discordant implications, or irreconcilabilities with the System, were perceived, that excommunication was pronounced against them.

Prof. Schwedoff's paper was read before the British Association (Rept. of 1882, p. 453).

The implication, and the repulsiveness of the implication to the snug and tight little exclusionists of 1882--though we hold out that they were functioning well and ably relatively to 1882--

That there is water--oceans or lakes and ponds, or rivers of it--that there is water away from, and yet not far-remote from, this earth's atmosphere and gravitation--

The pain of it:

That the snug little system of 1882 would be ousted from its reposefulness--

A whole new science to learn:

The Science of Super-Geography--

And Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things.

So the members of the British Association. To some of them Prof. Schwedoff's ideas were like slaps on the back of an environment-denying turtle: to some of them his heresy was like an offering of meat, raw and dripping, to milk-fed lambs. Some of them bleated like lambs, and some of them turled like turtles. We used to crucify, but now we ridicule: or, in the loss of vigor of all progress, the spike has etherealized into the laugh.

Sir William Thomson ridiculed the heresy, with the phantomosities of his era:

That all bodies, such as hailstones, if away from this earth's atmosphere, would have to move at planetary velocity--which would be positively reasonable if the pronouncements of St. Isaac were anything but articles of faith--that a hailstone falling through the earth's atmosphere, with planetary velocity, would perform 13,000 times as much work as would raise an equal weight of water one degree centigrade, and therefore never fall as a hailstone at all; be more than melted--super-volatalized--

These turls and these bleats of pedantry--though we insist that, relatively to 1882, these turls and bleats should be regarded as respectfully as we regard rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless--it is the survival of rag dolls into maturity that we object to--so these pious and naïve ones who believed that 13,000 times something could have--that is, in quasi-existence--an exact and calculable resultant, whereas there is--in quasi-existence--nothing that can, except by delusion and convenience, be called a unit, in the first place--whose devotions to St. Isaac required blind belief in formulas of falling bodies--

Against data that were piling up, in their own time, of slow-falling meteorites; "milk warm" ones admitted even by Farrington and Merrill; at least one icy meteorite nowhere denied by the present orthodoxy, a datum as accessible to Thomson in 1882, as it is now to us, because it was an occurrence of 1860. Beans and needles and tacks and a magnet. Needles and tacks adhere to and systematize relatively to a magnet, but, if some beans, too, be caught up, they are irreconcilables to this system and drop right out of it. A member of the Salvation Army may hear over and over data that seem so memorable to an evolutionist. It seems remarkable that they do not influence him--one finds that he cannot remember them. It is incredible that Sir William Thomson had never heard of slow-falling, cold meteorites. It is simply that he had no power to remember such irreconcilabilities.

And then Mr. Symons again. Mr. Symons was a man who probably did more for the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time: therefore he probably did more to hold back the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time. In Nature, 41-135, Mr. Symons says that Prof. Schwedoff's ideas are "very droll."

I think that even more amusing is our own acceptance that, not very far above this earth's surface, is a region that will be the subject of a whole new science--super-geography--with which we shall immortalize ourselves in the resentments of the schoolboys of the future--

Pebbles and fragments of meteors and things from Mars and Jupiter and Azuria: wedges, delayed messages, cannon balls, bricks, nails, coal and coke and charcoal and offensive old cargoes--things that coat in ice in some regions and things that get into areas so warm that they putrefy--or that there are all the climates of geography in super-geography. I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there often are fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic Ocean--volumes of water in which are many fishes and frogs--tracts of land covered with caterpillars--

Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds--and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages. Sometime I shall write a guide book to the Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators, but just at present there wouldn't be much call for it.

We now have more of our expression upon hail as a concomitant, or more data of things that have fallen from the sky, with hail.

In general, the expression is:

These things may have been raised from some other part of the earth's surface, in whirlwinds, or may not have fallen, and may have been upon the ground, in the first place--but were the hailstones found with them, raised from some other part of the earth's surface, or were the hailstones upon the ground, in the first place?

As I said before, this expression is meaningless as to a few instances; it is reasonable to think of some coincidence between the fall of hail and the fall of other things: but, inasmuch as there have been a good many instances,--we begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences. If not conceivably could very large hailstones and lumps of ice form in this earth's atmosphere, and so then had to come from external regions, then other things in or accompanying very large hailstones and lumps of ice came from external regions--which worries us a little: we may be instantly translated to the Positive Absolute.

Cosmos, 13-120, quotes a Virginia newspaper, that fishes said to have been catfishes, a foot long, some of them, had fallen, in 1853, at Norfolk, Virginia, with hail.

Vegetable débris, not only nuclear, but frozen upon the surfaces of large hailstones, at Toulouse, France, July 28, 1874. (La Science Pour Tous, 1874-270.)

Description of a storm, at Pontiac, Canada, July 11, 1864, in which it is said that it was not hailstones that fell, but these "pieces of ice, from half an inch to over two inches in diameter." (Canadian Naturalist, 2-1-308):

"But the most extraordinary thing is that a respectable farmer, of undoubted veracity, says he picked up a piece of hail, or ice, in the center of which was a small green frog."

Storm at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, in which fell hailstones and pieces of ice (Monthly Weather Review, June, 1882):

"The foreman of the Novelty Iron Works, of this city, states that in two large hailstones melted by him were found small living frogs." But pieces of ice that fell upon this occasion had a peculiarity that indicates--though by as bizarre an indication as any we've had yet--that they had been for a long time motionless or floating somewhere. We'll take that up soon.

Living Age, 52-186:

That, June 30, 1841, fishes, one of which was ten inches long, fell at Boston; that, eight days later, fishes and ice fell at Derby.

In Timb's Year Book, 1842-275, it is said that, at Derby, the fishes had fallen in enormous numbers; from half an inch to two inches long, and some considerably larger. In the Athenum, 1841-542, copied from the Sheffield Patriot, it is said that one of the fishes weighed three ounces. In several accounts, it is said that, with the fishes, fell many small frogs and pieces of "half-melted ice." We are told that the frogs and the fishes had been raised from some other part of the earth's surface, in a whirlwind; no whirlwind specified; nothing said as to what part of the earth's surface comes ice, in the month of July--interests us that the ice is described as "half-melted." In the London Times, July 15, 1841, it is said that the fishes were sticklebacks; that they had fallen with ice and small frogs, many of which had survived the fall. We note that, at Dunfermline, three months later (Oct. 7, 1841) fell many fishes, several inches in length, in a thunderstorm. (London Times, Oct. 12, 1841.)

Hailstones we don't care so much about. The matter of stratification seems significant, but we think more of the fall of lumps of ice from the sky, as possible data of the Super-Sargasso Sea:

Lumps of ice, a foot in circumference, Derbyshire, England, May 12, 1811 (Annual Register, 1811-54); cuboidal mass, six inches in diameter, that fell near Birmingham, 26 days later, June 8, 1811 (Thomson, "Intro. to Meteorology," p. 129); size of pumpkins, Bungalore, India, May 22, 1851 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1855-35); masses of ice of a pound and a half each, New Hampshire, Aug. 13, 1851 (Lummis, "Meteorology," p. 129); masses of ice, size of a man's head, in the Delphos tornado (Ferrel, "Popular Treatise," p. 428); large as a man's hand, killing thousands of sheep, Mason, Texas, May 3, 1877 (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1877); "pieces of ice so large that they could not be grasped in one hand," in a tornado, in Colorado, June 24, 1877 (Monthly Weather Review, June, 1877); lump of ice four and a half inches long, Richmond, England, Aug. 2, 1879 (Symons' Met. Mag., 14-100); mass of ice, 21 inches in circumference that fell with hail, Iowa, June, 1881 (Monthly Weather Review, June, 1881); "pieces of ice" eight inches long, and an inch and a half thick, Davenport, Iowa, Aug. 30, 1882 (Monthly Weather Review, Aug., 1882); lump of ice size of a brick; weight two pounds, Chicago, July 12, 1883, (Monthly Weather Review, July, 1883); lumps of ice that weighed one pound and a half each, India, May (?), 1888, (Nature, 37-42); lump of ice weighing four pounds, Texas, Dec. 6, 1893 (Sc. Am., 68-58); lumps of ice one pound in weight, Nov. 14, 1901, in a tornado, Victoria (Meteorology of Australia, p. 34).

Of course it is our acceptance that these masses not only accompanied tornadoes, but were brought down to this earth by tornadoes.

Flammarion, "The Atmosphere," p. 34:

Block of ice, weighing four and a half pounds fell at Cazorta, Spain, June 15, 1829; block of ice, weighing eleven pounds, at Cette, France, Oct., 1844; mass of ice three feet long, three feet wide, and more than two feet thick, that fell, in a storm, in Hungary, May 8, 1802.

Scientific American, 47-119:

That, according to the Salina Journal, a mass of ice weighing about 80 pounds had fallen from the sky, near Salina, Kansas, Aug., 1882. We are told that Mr. W. J. Hagler, the North Sante Fé merchant became possessor of it, and packed it in sawdust in his store.

London Times, April 7, 1860:

That, upon the 16th of March, 1860, in a snowstorm, in Upper Wasdale, blocks of ice, so large that at a distance they looked like a flock of sheep, had fallen.

Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1851-32:

That a mass of ice about a cubic yard in size had fallen at Candeish, India, 1828.

Against these data, though, so far as I know, so many of them have never been assembled together before, there is a silence upon the part of scientific men that is unusual. Our Super-Sargasso Sea may not be an unavoidable conclusion, but arrival upon this earth of ice from external regions does seem to be--except that there must be, be it ever so faint, a merger. It is in the notion that these masses of ice are only congealed hailstones. We have data against this notion, as applied to all our instances, but the explanation has been offered, and, it seems to me, may apply in some instances. In the Bull. Soc. Astro. de France, 20-245, it is said of blocks of ice the size of decanters that had fallen at Tunis that they were only masses of congealed hailstones.

London Times, Aug. 4, 1857:

That a block of ice, described as "pure" ice, weighing 25 pounds, had been found in the meadow of Mr. Warner, of Cricklewood. There had been a storm the day before. As in some of our other instances, no one had seen this object fall from the sky. It was found after the storm: that's all that can be said about it.

Letter from Capt. Blakiston, communicated by Gen. Sabine, to the Royal Society (London Roy. Soc. Proc., 10-468):

That, Jan. 14, 1860, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice had fallen upon Capt. Blakiston's vessel--that it was not hail. "It was not hail, but irregular shaped pieces of solid ice of different dimensions, up to the size of half a brick."

According to the Advertiser-Scotsman, quoted by the Edinburgh New Philosophical Magazine, 47-371, an irregular-shaped mass of ice fell at Ord, Scotland, Aug., 1849, after "an extraordinary peal of thunder."

It is said that this was homogeneous ice, except in a small part, which looked like congealed hailstones.

The mass was about 20 feet in circumference.

The story, as told in the London Times, Aug. 14, 1849, is that, upon the evening of the 13th of August, 1849, after a loud peal of thunder, a mass of ice said to have been 20 feet in circumference, had fallen upon the estate of Mr. Moffat, of Balvullich, Ross-shire. It is said that this object fell alone, or without hailstones.

Altogether, though it is not so strong for the Super-Sargasso Sea, I think this is one of our best expressions upon external origins. That large blocks of ice could form in the moisture of this earth's atmosphere is about as likely as that blocks of stone could form in a dust whirl. Of course, if ice or water comes to this earth from external sources, we think of at least minute organisms in it, and on, with our data, to frogs, fishes; on to anything that's thinkable, coming from external sources. It's of great importance to us to accept that large lumps of ice have fallen from the sky, but what we desire most--perhaps because of our interest in its archæologic and paleontologic treasures--is now to be through with tentativeness and probation, and to take the Super-Sargasso Sea into full acceptance in our more advanced fold of the chosen of this twentieth century.

In the Report of the British Association, 1855-37, it is said that, at Poorhundur, India, Dec. 11, 1854, flat pieces of ice, many of them weighing several pounds--each, I suppose--had fallen from the sky. They are described as "large ice-flakes."

Vast fields of ice in the Super-Arctic regions, or strata, of the Super-Sargasso Sea. When they break up, their fragments are flake-like. In our acceptance, there are aerial ice-fields that are remote from this earth; that break up, fragments grinding against one another, rolling in vapor and water, of different constituency in different regions, forming slowly as stratified hailstones--but that there are ice-fields near this earth, that break up into just flat pieces of ice as cover any pond or river when ice of a pond or river is broken, and are sometimes soon precipitated to the earth, in this familiar flat formation.

Symons' Met. Mag., 43-154:

A correspondent writes that, at Braemar, July 2, 1908, when the sky was clear overhead, and the sun shining, pieces of ice fell--from somewhere. The sun was shining, but something was going on somewhere: thunder was heard.

Until I saw the reproduction of a photograph in the Scientific American, Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be, say, at least ten to twenty miles away from this earth, and [178/179] invisible, to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by the Scientific American is of an aggregation supposed to be clouds, presumably not very high, so clearly detailed they are. The writer says that they looked to him like "a field of broken ice." Beneath is a picture of a conventional field of ice, floating ordinarily in the water. The resemblance between the two pictures is striking--nevertheless, it seems to me incredible that the first of the photographs could be of an aerial ice-field, or that gravitation could cease to act at only a mile or so from this earth's surface--

Unless:

The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.

Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen miles outward--but that gravitation must be rhythmic.

Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only insecure approximations.

We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping arrogance, to Herbert Spencer's chapters upon the rhythm of all phenomena.

If everything else--light from the stars, heat from the sun, the winds and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; demands and supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic reactions and religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the ticking of clocks; and the arrival and departure of the seasons--if everything else is variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed and formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like all other illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is intermediatism to accept that, though gravitation may approximate higher to invariability than do the winds, for instance, it must be somewhere between the Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here then we are not much impressed with the opposition of physicists and astronomers, fearing, a little mournfully, that their language is of expiring sibilations.

So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be seen in detail. For description of what I call a "blur," see Pop. Sci. News, Feb., 1884--sky, in general, unusually clear, but, near the sun, "a white, slightly curdled haze, which was dazzlingly bright."

We accept that sometimes fields of ice pass between the sun and the earth: that many strata of ice, or very thick fields of ice, or superimposed fields would obscure the sun--that there have been occasions when the sun was eclipsed by fields of ice:

Flammarion, "The Atmosphere," p. 394:

That a profound darkness came upon the city of Brussels, June 18, 1839:

There fell flat pieces of ice, an inch long.

Intense darkness at Aitkin, Minn., April 2, 1889; sand and "solid chunks of ice" reported to have fallen (Science, April 19, 1889).

In Symons' Meteorological Magazine, 32-172, are outlined rough-edged by smooth-surfaced pieces of ice that fell at Manassas, Virginia, Aug. 10, 1897. They look as much like the roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice--as ever have roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice looked. About two inches across, and one inch thick. In Cosmos, 3-116, it is said that, at Rouen, July 5, 1853, fell irregular-shaped pieces of ice, about the size of a hand, described as looking as if all had been broken from one enormous block of ice. That I think, was an aerial iceberg. In the awful density, or almost absolute stupidity of the 19th century, it never occurred to anybody to look for traces of polar bears or of seals upon these fragments.

Of course, seeing what we want to see, having been able to gather these data only because they are in agreement with notions formed in advance, we are not so respectful to our own notions as to a similar impression forced upon an observer who had no theory or acceptance to support. In general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this should not be taken as an absolute.

Monthly Weather Review, July, 1894:

That, from the Weather Bureau, of Portland, Oregon, a tornado, of June 3, 1894, was reported.

Fragments of ice fell from the sky.

They averaged three to four inches square, and about an inch thick. In length and breadth they had the smooth surfaces required by our acceptance: and, according to the writer in the Review, "gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the "damned," or before we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried condemnation by infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied--but without comment--in the Scientific American, 71-371.

Our theology is something like this:

Of course we ought to be damned--but we revolt against adjudication by infants, turtles, and lambs.

We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult department of super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There's a lesson to me in the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our opposition is in the clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a few miles above this earth--then the shining of the sun, and the ice partly melting--that note upon the ice that fell at Derby--water trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I seemed to look up and so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like stalactites from a flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at the under side of an aerial ice-lump, and seemed to see a papillation similar to that observed by a calf at times. But then--but then--if icicles should form upon the under side of a sheet of aerial ice, that would be by the falling of water toward this earth; an icicle is of course an expression of gravitation--and, if water melting from ice should fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an icicle could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the ice does not, because ice is heavier--that is, in masses. That notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at the present.

Our expression upon icicles:

A vast field of aerial ice--it is inert to this earth's gravitation--but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth, and is susceptible to gravitation--by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles--then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles.

Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said (Monthly Weather Review, June, 1882), that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circumference, the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters--that upon some of them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these objects were not hailstones.

The only merger is that of knobby hailstones, or of large hailstones with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize--not forming by accretion--in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of such hailstones, see Nature, 61-594. Note the size--"some of them the size of turkeys' eggs."

It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen, as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the under side of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations.

Monthly Weather Review, June, 1889:

That, at Oswego, N. Y., June 9, 1889, according to the Turin (N. Y.) Leader, there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that "resembled the fragments of icicles."

Monthly Weather Review, 29-506:

That on Florence Island, St. Lawrence River, Aug. 8, 1901, with ordinary hail, fell pieces of ice "formed like icicles, the size and shape of lead pencils had been cut into section about three-eighths of an inch in length.

So our data of the Super-Sargasso Sea, and its Arctic region: and, for weeks at a time, an ice field may hang motionless over a part of this earth's surface--the sun has some effect upon it, but not much until late in the afternoon, I should say--part of it has sagged, but is held up by cohesion with the main mass--whereupon we have such an occurrence as would have been a little uncanny to us once upon a time--or fall of water from a cloudless sky, day after day, in one small part of the earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun's rays had had time for their effects:

Monthly Weather Review, Oct., 1886:

That, according to the Charlotte Chronicle, Oct. 21, 1886, for three weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N. C., localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o'clock; that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.

This is the newspaper account, and, as such, it seems in the depths of the unchosen, either by me or any other expression of the Salvation Army. The account by the Signal Service observer, at Charlotte, published in the Review, follows:

"An unusual phenomenon was witnessed on the 21st; having been informed that for some weeks prior to date rain had been falling daily after 3 p. m., on a particular spot, near two trees, corner of 9th and D streets, I visited the place, and saw precipitation in the form of rain drops at 4:47 and 4:55 p. m., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25 p. m., a light shower of rain fell from a cloudless sky....Sometimes the precipitation falls over an area of half an acre, but always appears to centre at these two trees, and when lightest occurs there only."

Book of the Damned Chapter XIV

WE see conventionally. It is not only that we think and act and speak and dress alike, because of our surrender to social attempt at Entity, in which we are only super-cellular. We see what it is "proper" that we should see. It is orthodox enough to say that a horse is not a horse, to an infant--any more than is an orange an orange to the unsophisticated. It's interesting to walk along a street sometimes and look at things and wonder what they'd look like, if we hadn't been taught to see horses and trees and houses as horses and trees and houses. I think that to super-sight they are local stresses merging indistinguishably into one another, in an all-inclusive nexus.

I think that it would be credible enough to say that many times have Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria crossed telescopic fields of vision, and were not even seen--because it wouldn't be proper to see them; it wouldn't be respectable, and it wouldn't be respectful: it would be insulting to old bones to see them: it would bring on evil influences from the relics of St. Isaac to see them.

But our data:

Of vast worlds that are orbitless, or that are navigable, or that are adrift in inter-planetary tides and currents: the data that we shall have of their approach, in modern times, within five or six miles of this earth--

But then their visits, or approaches, to other planets, or to other of the few regularized bodies that have surrendered to the attempted Entity of this solar system as a whole--

The question that we can't very well evade:

Have these other worlds, or super-constructions, ever been seen by astronomers?

I think there would not be much approximation to realness in taking refuge in the notion of astronomers who stare and squint and see only that which it is respectable and respectful to see. It is all very well to say that astronomers are hypnotics, and that an astronomer looking at the moon is hypnotized by the moon, but our acceptance is that the bodies of this present expression often visit the moon, or cross it, or are held in temporary suspension near it--then some of them must often have been within the diameter of an astronomer's hypnosis.

Our general expression:

That, upon the oceans of this earth, there are regularized vessels, but also that there are tramp vessels:

That, upon the super-ocean, there are regularized planets, but also that there are tramp worlds:

That astronomers are like mercantile purists who would deny commercial vagabondage.

Our acceptance is that vast celestial vagabonds have been excluded by astronomers, primarily because their irresponsibilities are an affront to the pure and the precise, or to attempted positivism; and secondarily because they have not been seen so very often. The planets steadily reflect the light of the sun: upon this uniformity a system that we call Primary Astronomy has been built up; but now the subject-matter of Advanced Astronomy is data of celestial phenomena that are sometimes light and sometimes dark, varying like some of the satellites of Jupiter, but with a wider range. However, light or dark, they have been seen and reported so often that the only important reason for their exclusion is--that they don't fit in.

With dark bodies that are probably external to our own solar system, I have, in the provincialism that no one can escape, not much concern. Dark bodies afloat in outer space would have been damned a few years ago, but now they're sanctioned by Prof. Barnard--and, if he says they're all right, you may think of them without the fear of doing something wrong or ridiculous--the close kinship we note so often between the evil and the absurd--I suppose by the ridiculous I mean the froth of evil. The dark companion of Algol, for instance. Though that's a clear case of celestial miscegenation, the purists, or positivists, admit that's so. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1915-394, Prof. Barnard writes of an object--he calls it an "object"--in Cephus. His idea is that there are dark, opaque bodies outside this solar system. But in the Astrophysical Journal, 1916-1, he modifies into regarding them as "dark nebulæ." That's not so interesting.

We accept that Venus, for instance, has often been visited by other worlds, or by super-constructions, from which come cinders and coke and coal; that sometimes these things have reflected light and have been seen from this earth--by professional astronomers. It will be noted that throughout this chapter our data are accursed Brahmins--as, by hypnosis and inertia, we keep on and keep on saying, just as a good many of the scientists of the 19th century kept on and kept on admitting the power of the system that preceded them--or Continuity would be smashed. There's a big chance here for us to be instantaneously translated to the Positive Absolute--oh, well--

What I emphasize here is that our damned data are observations by astronomers of the highest standing, excommunicated by astronomers of similar standing--but backed up by the dominant spirit of their era--to which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged. It would seem sometimes, in this book, as if our revolts were against the dogmatisms and pontifications of single scientists of eminence. This is only a convenience, because it seems necessary to personify. If we look over Philosophical Transactions, or the publications of the Royal Astronomical Society, for instance, we see that Herschel, for instance, was as powerless as any boy star-gazer, to enforce acceptance of any observation of his that did not harmonize with the system that was growing up as independently of him and all other astronomers, as a phase in the development of an embryo compels all cells to take on appearances concordantly with the design and the predetermined progress and schedule of the whole.

Visitors to Venus:

Evans, "Ways of the Planets," p. 140:

That, in 1645, a body large enough to look like a satellite was seen near Venus. Four times in the first half of the 18th century, a similar observation was reported. The last report occurred in 1767.

A large body has been seen--seven times, according to Science Gossip, 1886-178--near Venus. At least one astronomer, Houzeau, accepted these observations and named the--world, planet, super-construction--"Neith." His views are mentioned "in passing, but without endorsement," in the Trans. N. Y. Acad., 5-249.

Houzeau or some one writing for the magazine-section of a Sunday newspaper--outer darkness for both alike. A new satellite in this solar system might be a little disturbing--though the formulas of La Place, which were considered final in his day, have survived the admittance of five or six hundred bodies not included in those formulas--a satellite to Venus might be a little disturbing, but would be explained--but a large body approaching a planet--staying a while--going away--coming back some other time--anchoring, as it were--

Azuria is pretty bad, but Azuria is no worse than Neith.

Astrophysical Journal, 1-127:

A light-reflecting body, or a bright spot near Mars: seen Nov. 25, 1894, by Prof. Pickering and others, at the Lowell Observatory, above an unilluminated part of Mars--self-luminous, it would seem--thought to have been a cloud--but estimated to have been about twenty miles away from the planet.

Luminous spot seen moving across the disk of Mercury, in 1799, by Harding and Schroeter. (Monthly Notices of the R. A. S., 38-338.)

In the first Bulletin issued by the Lowell Observatory, in 1903, Prof. Lowell describes a body that was seen on the terminator of Mars, May 20, 1903. On May 27, it was "suspected." If still there, it had moved, we are told, about 300 miles--"probably a dust cloud."

Very conspicuous and brilliant spots seen on the disk of Mars, Oct. and Nov., 1911. (Popular Astronomy, Vol. 19, No. 10.)

So one of them accepted six or seven observations that were in agreement, except that they could not be regularized, upon a world--planet--satellite--and he gave it a name. He named it "Neith."

Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria and Super-Romanimus--

Or heresy and orthodoxy and the oneness of all quasiness, and our ways and means and methods are the very same. Or, if we name things that may not be, we are not of lonely guilt in the nomenclature of absences--

But now Leverrier and "Vulcan."

Leverrier again.

Or to demonstrate the collapsibility of froth, stick a pin in the largest bubble of it. Astronomy and inflation: and by inflation we mean expansion of the attenuated. Or that the science of Astronomy is a phantom-film distended with myth-stuff--but always our acceptance that it approximates higher to substantiality than did the system that preceded it.

So Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan."

And we repeat, and it will do us small good to repeat. If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized--being themselves hypnotized, or they could not hypnotize others--or that the hypnotist's control is not the masterful power that it is popularly supposed to be, but only transference of state from one hypnotic to another--

If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized, you will not be able even to remember. Ten pages from here, and Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan" will have fallen from your mind, like beans from a magnet, or like data of cold meteorites from the mind of a Thomson.

Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan."

And much the good it will do us to repeat.

But at least temporarily we shall have an impression of a historic fiasco, such as, in our acceptance, could occur only in a quasi-existence.

In 1859, Dr. Lescarbault, an amateur astronomer, of Orgères, France, announced that, upon March 26, of that year, he had seen a body of planetary size cross the sun. We are in a subject that is now as unholy to the present system as ever were its own subjects to the system that preceded it, or as ever were slanders against miracles to the preceding system. Nevertheless few text-books go so far as quite to disregard the tragedy. The method of the systematists is slightingly to give a few instances of the unholy, and dispose of the few. If it were desirable to them to deny that there are mountains upon this earth, they would record a few observations upon some slight eminences near Orange, N.J., but say that commuters, though estimable persons in several ways, are likely to have their observations mixed. The text-books casually mention a few of the "supposed" observations upon "Vulcan," and then pass on.

Dr. Lescarbault wrote to Leverrier, who hastened to Orgères--

Because this announcement assimilated with his own calculations upon a planet between Mercury and the sun--

Because this solar system itself has never attained positiveness in the aspect of Regularity: there are to Mercury, as there are to Neptune, phenomena irreconcilable with the formulas, or motions that betray influence by something else.

We are told that Leverrier "satisfied himself as to the substantial accuracy of the reported observation." The story of this investigation is told in Monthly Notices, 20-98. It seems too bad to threaten the naïve little thing with our rude sophistications, but it is amusingly of the ingenuousness of the age from which present dogmas have survived. Lescarbault wrote to Leverrier. Leverrier hastened to Orgères. But he was careful not to tell Lescarbault who he was. Went right in, and "subjected Dr. Lescarbault to a very severe cross-examination"--just the way you or I may feel at liberty to go into anybody's home and be severe with people--"pressing him hard step by step"--just as any one might go into some one else's house and press him hard, though unknown to the hard-pressed one. Not until he was satisfied, did Leverrier reveal his identity. I suppose Dr. Lescarbault expressed astonishment. I think there's something utopian about this: it's so unlike the stand-offishness of New York life.

Leverrier gave the name "Vulcan" to the object that Dr. Lescarbault had reported.

By the same means by which he is, even to this day, supposed--by the faithful--to have discovered Neptune, he had already announced the probable existence of an Intra-Mercurial body, or group of bodies. He had five observations besides Lescarbault's upon something that had been seen to cross the sun. In accordance with the mathematical hypnoses of his era, he studied these six transits. Out of them he computed elements giving "Vulcan" a period of about 20 days, or a formula for heliocentric longitude at any time.

But he placed the time of best observation away up in 1877.

But even so, or considering that he still had probably a good many years to live, it may strike one that he was a little rash--that is if one has not gone very deep into the study of hypnoses--that, having "discovered" Neptune by a method which, in our acceptance, had no more to recommend it than had once equally well-thought-of methods of witch-finding, he should not have taken such chances: that if he was right as to Neptune, but he should be wrong as to "Vulcan," his average would be away below that of most fortune-tellers, who could scarcely hope to do business upon a fifty per cent. basis--all that the reasoning of a tyro in hypnoses.

The date:

March 22, 1877.

The scientific world was up on its hind legs nosing the sky. The thing had been done so authoritatively. Never a pope had said a thing with more of the seeming of finality. If six observations correlated, what more could be asked? The Editor of Nature, a week before the predicted event, though cautious, said that it is difficult to explain how six observers, unknown to one another, could have data that could be formulated, if they were not related phenomena.

In a way, at this point occurs the crisis of our whole book.

Formulas are against us.

But can astronomic formulas, backed up by observations in agreement, taken many years apart, calculated by a Leverrier, be as meaningless, in a positive sense, as all other quasi-things that we have encountered so far?

The preparations they made, before March 22, 1877. In England, the Astronomer Royal made it the expectation of his life: notified observers at Madras, Melbourne, Sydney, and New Zealand, and arranged with observers in Chile and the United States. M. Struve had prepared for observations in Siberia and Japan--

March 22, 1877--

Not absolutely, hypocritically, I think it's pathetic, myself. If any one should doubt the sincerity of Leverrier, in this matter, we note, whether it has meaning or not, that a few months later he died.

I think we'll take up Monstrator, though there's so much to this subject that we'll have to come back.

According to the Annual Register, 9-120, upon the 9th of August, 1762, M. de Rostan, of Basle, France, was taking altitudes of the sun, at Lausanne. He saw a vast, spindle-shaped body, about three of the sun's digits in breadth and nine in length, advancing slowly across the disk of the sun, or "with no more than half the velocity with which ordinary solar spots move." It did not disappear until the 7th of September, when it reached the sun's limb. Because of the spindle-like form, I incline to think of a super-Zeppelin, but another observation, which seems to indicate that it was a world, is that, though it was opaque, and "eclipsed the sun," it had around it a kind of nebulosity--or atmosphere? A penumbra would ordinarily be a datum of a sun spot, but there are observations that