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 to 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 someone'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 and 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 at 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, and cattle.
First find out that 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 today—the superstition of tomorrow. Science of tomorrow—the superstition of today.
Notice of a stone ax, 17 inches long: 9 inches across broad end. (Proc. Soc. of Ants. of Scotland, 1-9-184.)
Amer. Antiquarian, 18-60:
Copper ax from an Ohio mound: 22 inches long; weight 38 pounds.
Amer. 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 300 pounds.
Or 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 theJournal—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—someone 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 anyone will take the trouble to look up these footprints, as pictured in theJournal, 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 a 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 inHarper's Weekly, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in theScientific 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 scientific tropism—"Geologists say that they are crystals." The writer inHarper's Weeklypoints 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 some 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 damnedest.
"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 "pygmy flints" are found, all flints are pygmies—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:
InScience Gossip, 1896-36, R.A. Galty 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 own method 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 here—horrified with anyone who would gorge himself with more than a bean at a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle more than a dewdrop at a time—hordes of 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.
LondonTimes, 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 theProceedings 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:
InPopular 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 pygmy animal world," 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 Astronomic 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 and 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 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 or 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.
Worlds 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 no 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 hilltops and built forts. In a real existence, hilltops, 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 hilltops, in times of danger, we run to them just the same, even with danger closest to hilltops. Very common in quasi-existence: attempt to escape by running closer to the pursuing.
They built forts, or already had forts, on hilltops.
Something poured electricity upon them.
The stones of these forts exist to this day, vitrified, or melted and turned to glass.
The archaeologists 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 archaeologists, 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 for 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 theJournal 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, ourselves, 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.
One of the most extraordinary of 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 recognitions 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.
LondonTimes, 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 broken, and several articles of furniture were destroyed. Although there was a strong body of policemen scattered in the neighborhood, 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.
LondonTimes, 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, August, 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, unknown 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, August, 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, September, 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 that 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 on 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 Orenburg, Russia, September, 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 (Œuvres, 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 a 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 theMonthly Weather Reviewand 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 theWar 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 cannot, 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 this 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. InNature, 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 "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 the 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'sYear 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 theAthenæum, 1841-542, copied from the SheffieldPatriot, 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 LondonTimes, 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. (LondonTimes, 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 at Birmingham, 26 days later (Thomson,Intro. to Meteorology, p. 179); size of pumpkins, Bangalore, 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, 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); lumps 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 that fell at Cazorta, Spain, June 15, 1829; block of ice, weighing eleven pounds, at Cette, France, October, 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 theSalina Journal, a mass of ice weighing about 80 pounds had fallen from the sky, near Salina, Kansas, August, 1882. We are told that Mr. W.J. Hagler, the North Santa Fé merchant became possessor of it, and packed it in sawdust in his store.
LondonTimes, 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 theBull. 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.
LondonTimes, 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 theAdvertiser-Scotsman, quoted by the EdinburghNew Philosophical Magazine, 47-371, an irregular-shaped mass of ice fell at Ord, Scotland, August, 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 LondonTimes, 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 archaeologic and palaeontologic 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 theReport 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 such 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, flat 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 theScientific American, Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be, say, at least ten or twenty miles away from this earth, and invisible, to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by theScientific Americanis of an aggregation supposed to be clouds, presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are they. 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 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 the 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 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," seePop. Sci. News, February, 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).
InSymons' Meteorological Magazine, 32-172, are outlined rough-edged but 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. InCosmos, 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 theReview, "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 theScientific 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 the ice is heavier—that is, in masses. That notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at 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, seeNature, 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 11, 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 that had been cut into sections 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 this earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun's rays had had time for their effects:
Monthly Weather Review, October, 1886:
That, according to the CharlotteChronicle, 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 theReview, 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 3P.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 4:55P.M., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25P.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 center at these two trees, and when lightest occurs there only."