489 lines
206 KiB
Plaintext
489 lines
206 KiB
Plaintext
The Complete Books of Charles Fort
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The Complete Books of Charles Fort
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THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED / NEW LANDS / LO! / WILD TALENTS
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With a new Introduction by
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DAMON KNIGHT
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Founder and first President of Science Fiction Writers of America, author of Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained
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DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC. NEW YORK
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Copyright © 1974 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
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This Dover edition, first published in 1974, is a republication of the omnibus volume originally published for the Fortean Society by Henry Holt and Company, New York, in 1941. The four books by Fort are unabridged and unaltered, but the 1941 Introduction by Tiffany Thayer has been omitted. A new Introduction has been written specially for the present edition by Damon Knight. The publisher is grateful to Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., for permission to reproduce the Index originally prepared for the 1941 omnibus volume.
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The individual books by Fort were originally published as follows: The Book of the Damned, Boni and Liveright. Inc., New York, 1919; New Lands, Boni and Liveright, Inc., New York, 1923; Lo!, Claude H. Kendall, New York, 1931; Wild Talents, Claude H. Kendall, New York, 1932.
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The present edition has had the encouragement and cooperation of the International Fortean Society (Info), P.O. Box 367. Arlington, Virginia 22210. International Standard Book Number: 0-486-23094-5 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-79217
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Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation 23094511
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www.doverpublications.com
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Charles Fort was born in Albany, New York, August 6, 1874, and died in the Bronx, May 3, 1932. He spent most of his life in New York City, but lived in London for several years in the twenties. His published works include The Books of Charles Fort and a novel, The Outcast Manufacturers.
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Letter from Charles Fort to Kenneth Roberts, the novelist.
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INTRODUCTION
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TO THE DOVER EDITION
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Charles Fort, eighteen years old, slammed his father’s stained-glass front door hard enough to break it. Shortly thereafter he left home and spent a
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year newspapering, then traveled around the world on about eighty cents a day. He married a woman who, according to one account, had been a cook in his grandfather’s house, and they settled down in New York to twenty years of poverty. Then, at forty-two, Charles Fort came into a modest inheritance, and he and his wife lived happily ever after.
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What charms me about this story, remembering all the cautionary tales about people spoiled by money, is the fact that the inheritance transformed Fort’s life for the better. He was able to drop the journalism and fiction that no one especially wanted, and do exactly what he wanted to do. What he wanted was to write the books you hold in your hand.
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Some discoveries can be made only by the exercise of inhuman patience. The Curies refined radium. Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees. Charles Fort sat at a table in the New York Public Library or the British Museum every working day for twenty-seven years, reading and rereading the back files of every available scientific journal, popular science magazine and newspaper. When he found something out of the ordinary and not conventionally explainable, he made a note of it. Eventually he had thousands of these notes, written on little slips of paper, filed in shoeboxes.
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He found that sober and experienced observers, again and again, had reported falls of blood, of fish, of frogs ; had seen unknown bodies in the heavens and unknown objects flying overhead. Long before they were called “UFOs,” Fort listed sightings of oddities in the sky from as far back as 1779. Some of these things had been seen by hundreds of people, for example the “unknown airship’’ that flew back and forth over Britain in 1913. It appeared for three weeks over England and Wales. Fort said: “Possibly an airship from Germany could appear over such a city as Hull, upon the east coast of England, without being seen to arrive or to depart, but so far from Germany is Portsmouth, for instance, that one does feel that something else will have to be thought of. The appearances over Liverpool and over towns in Wales might be attributed to German airships by someone who has not seen a map since he left school.” The “airship” had a searchlight that swept the ground. Newspaper pundits said it was the planet Venus.
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Fort was at his best when he began to examine why and on what grounds these data had been excluded. Take, for example, the fishmonger explanation of a fall of periwinkles and crabs:
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Upon May 28, 1881, near the city of Worcester, England, a fishmonger, with a procession of carts, loaded with several kinds of crabs and periwinkles, and with a dozen energetic assistants, appeared at a time when nobody on a busy road was looking. The fishmonger and his assistants grabbed sacks of periwinkles, and ran in a frenzy, slinging the things into fields on both sides of the road. . . . The details are mine, but I have put them in, strictly in accordance with the circumstances. There was, upon May 28, 1881, an occurrence near Worcester, and the conventional explanation was that a fishmonger did it. Inasmuch as he did it unobserved, if he did it, and inasmuch as he did it with tons upon acres, if he did it, he did it as I have described, if he did it.
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He noted that at one time only superstitious persons believed that stones could fall from the sky: therefore when a supposed meteorite was found, it had been “there in the first place.” Now, when strange things are seen or heard in the sky, they are “only meteors.”
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In a letter to Theodore Dreiser (October 29, 1916) Fort replied to Waldemar Kaempffert’s charges that he was a Christian Scientist and a Berkeleyite. He did not believe with Berkeley, Fort said, that all things exist only in the beholder’s consciousness ; he believed that all things, including beholders, are figments of a super-consciousness. As for inconsistency, another charge of Kaempffert’s, Fort said, “In ‘X’, I have pointed out that, though there’s nothing wrong with me personally, I am a delusion in superimagination, and inconsistency must therefore be expected from me—but if I’m so rational as to be aware of my irrationality ? Why, then I have glimmers of the awakening and awareness of super-imagination.”
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In 1931, when Tiffany Thayer and Aaron Sussman founded the Fortean Society, Fort had to be tricked by mendacious telegrams into attending the celebratory banquet. He said he would not join the organization himself, “any more than I’d be an Elk.”
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Thayer, an ambitious and energetic man, genuinely liked Fort and believed in him; he also tremendously enjoyed making trouble and irritating people. Under his direction (and paid for largely by him) the Fortean Society magazine Doubt was a curious mixture of pseudoscholarship and deliberate outrageous-ness. In his introduction to the original edition of this book, he pictures Fort as a medieval swordsman born out of his time (“it
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often occurred to me that his frame called for leather and buckles”), but this was typical hyperbole, probably influenced by the fact that Thayer himself was short and slender. Fort, in fact, was built more like a walrus than like a warrior ; he was an utterly peace-able and sedentary man. He lived quietly with his wife, almost never went out or had visitors, had no telephone. His only friends, except for a few apartment-house neighbors, were Dreiser and Thayer. He spent his mornings working at home, afternoons in the library ; he and his wife went to the movies nearly every night.
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Fort was championed during his lifetime by a long list of literary figures, most of whom are now little read. The Books of Charles Fort stayed in print in the original edition until the late sixties, when paperback editions of the separate volumes began to appear. Now, in this new edition, it has still another lease on life. Hundreds of thousands have read it who have never read Theodore Dreiser, Tiffany Thayer, Burton Rascoe, Booth Tarking ton or Ben Hecht. And yet it is not, by any ordinary standards. an easy book. Fort showers you with falls of insects, of fluff, of stones ; it sometimes seems that he wants to bury you in data. His interpretations are irregular, whimsical, mutually exclusive, elliptical and contrary. Just because of this, his book is one that can be gone back to again and again ; it does not wear out. I open it at random: “About the same time, water was mysteriously appearing at Martinsville, Ohio, according to the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Oct. 19, 1892. Behind a house, a mist was falling upon an area not more than a dozen feet square. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 19— that, in Water Street, Brownsville, Pa., there was a garden, in which was a peach tree, upon which water was falling.” And Fort adds: “For all I know, some trees may have occult powers.”
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You may read this book for the first time straight through if you like ; the second time you will probably invent your own way— skipping, sampling, making your own connections as you go. Fort would have approved of this ; he wrote, “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” And (as I open the book at random again): “A barrier to rational thinking, in anything like a final sense, is continuity, because of which only fictitiously can anything be picked out of a nexus of all things phenomenal, to think about.” This is Fort’s book, his life, his own voice ; he might have said of it, as Walt Whitman said of Leaves of Grass, “Who touches this book touches a man.”
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February 1974
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DAMON KNIGHT
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CONTENTS
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THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED NEW LANDS LO! WILD TALENTS INDEX
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The Complete Books of Charles Fort
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THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED 1
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PROCESSION of the damned.
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A 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.
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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.
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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.
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· · · · · · ·
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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—
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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.
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· · · · · · ·
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all standards, all means of forming an opinion—
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Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the fallacy that there are positive differences to judge by—
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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—
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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.
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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 house-ness, 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 seashore 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 intercontinuous, 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.
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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 cannot 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 pseudo-standards, have as much right to come in as have the chosen.
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· · · · · · ·
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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 positive-ness, 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 the 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.
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When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.
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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 to 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.
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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:
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The religious and their idea or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct, stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not a mere flux of vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with environment, merging away with an infinitude of other interdependent complexes.
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But the only thing that would not merge away into something else would be that besides which there is nothing else.
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That Truth is only another name for the positive state, or that the quest for Truth is the attempt to achieve positiveness:
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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—
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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 chem ical 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
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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.
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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.
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All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments.
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Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.
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But that all that we call “being” is motion: and that all motion is the expression, not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibirium 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 Inequi-librium.
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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 intermediate-ness 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
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arbitrary process as that by which the still less positive system that preceded it, or the theological system, wrought the illusion of its being.
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In this book, I assemble some of the data that I think are of the falsely and arbitrarily excluded.
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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.
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· · · · · · ·
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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’m 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;
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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.
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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:
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That, if every observable body is continuous, mediately or immediately, with all other bodies, it cannot 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 cannot be conceived of as a whole, and that there is no way of conceiving what it might be equal and opposite to—
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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.
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Enormities and preposterousnesses will march. They will be “proved” as well as Moses or Darwin or Lyell ever “proved” anything.
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· · · · · · ·
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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.
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· · · · · · ·
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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
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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.
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If it function as an expression of its era, it will prevail.
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· · · · · · ·
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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.
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· · · · · · ·
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That ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake of its essential fictitiousness—
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But that some appearances approximate far more highly to the positive state than do others.
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We conceive of all “things” as occupying gradations, or steps in series between positiveness and negativeness, or realness and unrealness: that
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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.
|
||
2
|
||
IN the autumn of 1883, and for years afterward, occurred brilliantcolored 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 have to 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 preposterousness 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 this 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 marvelously 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 threepounders. 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, I796-426 “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 marvelous 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 terrestrial 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 this 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 of the 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.
|
||
|
||
3
|
||
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 Intermediate-ness 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 systematization of pseudodata 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 goldenyellow 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’II 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 Harbor, 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 the 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, 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. Simenini, 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 —jetblack 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. four., 4-193.)
|
||
A black rain fell in Ireland, Oct. 8 and 9, 1907. (Symons’ Met. Mag. 432.) “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 celestial 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 mergingpoints, 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 nere, 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 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, cannot very acceptably merge with the explanation of extramundane origin— but smoke from a terrestrial 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 Marls-ford, 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 gregarious-ness 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 fardistant 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 débris: 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 débris 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, 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 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 Shetton, 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.
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· · · · · · ·
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Red rains.
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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 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 for 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
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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.
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For several days, the south of England was a dumping ground— from somewhere.
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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 Royal Chemical Society, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 February 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.
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The great difficulty that authoritativeness has to contend with is some other authoritativeness. When an infallibility clashes with a pontification—
|
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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 cannot 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
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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.
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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 cannot 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”;
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“dirty gray”; “quite red”; “yellow-brown, with a tinge of pink”; “deep yellow-clay color.”
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In Nature, it is described as of a peculiar yellowish cast in one place, reddish somewhere else, and salmon-colored in another place.
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Or there could be real science if there were really anything to be scientific about.
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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.
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Very easy matter. Samples from one part of town. Disregard for all the rest.
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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 only 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 by 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
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Atlantic Ocean and Europe in 1902 and 1903—that a whirl-wind that could do that would not be supposititious.
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But now we shall cast off some of our own wessicality by accepting that there have been falls of red substance other than sand.
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We regard every science as an expression of the attempt to be real. But to be real is to localize the universaI—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.
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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
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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.
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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—
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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 prosti-tutional in the positivist sense, that, in the sociologie 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— Débris from inter-planetary disasters. Aerial battles. Food-supplies from cargoes of super-vessels, wrecked in interplanetary 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.)
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But—infinite heterogeneity—or débris from many different kinds of aerial cargoes—there have been red rains that have been colored by neither sand nor animal matter.
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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 ocher, carbonate of lime, and organic matter. Orange-red hail, March 14, 1873, in Tuscany. (Notes and Queries 9-516.) 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 ever 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
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in Italy, June 23, 1877, containing “microscopically small particles of sand.”
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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.
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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 reinforced 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 fell 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 town.”
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4
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IT is in the records of the French Academy that, upon March 17, 1669, in the town of Châtillon-sur-Seine, fell a reddish substance that was “thick, viscous, and putrid.” American Journal of Science, 1-41-404:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 the 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 from 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 Professor 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,
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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 buffcolored, pulpy substance of the consistency of soft-soap, was found—“of an offensive, suffocating smell.”
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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 liquefied. For some of the chemic reactions, see the Journal.
|
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There’s another lost quasi-soul of a datum that seems to me to belong here:
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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 to 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.
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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—
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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 upon 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 whirl-wind. Now, I can’t say that nostoc 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.
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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.
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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
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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 coccygis 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 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 fibers. “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—
|
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|
||
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 today, 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
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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 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 jellyfish, about the size of a shilling, had fallen at Bath, England. I think it is not acceptable that they were jellyfish: but it does look as if this time frog spawn did fall from the sky, and may have been translated by a whirlwind—because, at 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 jellyfish 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 jellyfish nor masses of frog spawn, but something of a [line missing here in original text. Ed.] railroad station, at Bath. “Many 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 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 have 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 whirl-wind then scooping all up together— But several days later, more of these objects fell in the same 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 of 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, 186063, 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 Coblenz, 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 of 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., 1-26-396, 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 jellylike 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 teacup. 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, it 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.
|
||
5
|
||
ISHALL 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 cannot accept that there 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 the 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 has 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 8 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 millions of years.
|
||
All “things” are not things, but only relations, or expressions of relations: but all relations are striving to be the 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, allinclusive 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 said to be “manna”; and “manna” is dogmatically said to be a species of lichens from the steppes of Asia Minor. The position that 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 that fell 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: someone 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 that 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 were 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. Ehrenberg, “the meteor-paper was found to consist partly of vegetable matter, chiefly of conifervaœ.” Third act: Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen: Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited. Their composition was chiefly of conifervaœ. 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 as 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 “conifervaœ,” which seemed so convincing to the royal Irishmen. Vegetable composition is disregarded, quite as it might be by someone who might find it convenient to identify a crook-necked squash as a big fishhook. 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, “leaflikeness” 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 supposititious “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 conifervaœ.
|
||
Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, 1847-pt. I-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 fibers, but, when burned, they gave out “the common ammoniacal 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 fibers were not hairs; that the substance consisted chiefly of conifervaœ. 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. Laine, French Consul at Pernambuco, early in October, 1821, there was a shower of a substance resembling silk. The quantity was as 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. Laine, 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 the 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, Selborne, 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 inches 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 cannot 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 small 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 on 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 of 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 sees 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 cannot identify this substance. We thought that anything could be “identified” as anything. He can say only 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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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 catalogues, 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 Amer. Jour. Sci., 1-28361, 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
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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.
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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 Nîmes, 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 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.
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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.
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Or the red matter in rain, at Siena, Italy, May, 1830; said, by Arago, to have been vegetable matter (Arago, Œuvres, 12-468).
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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: or 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, 35-183: 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 Glasgow, 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 ordinarily remote origin has to be thought of. Dr. Machattie thinks of origin to the south. “However,” he says, “this is mere conjecture.” Amer. Jour. Sci., 1841-40:
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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.
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The natives were greatly excited—because it was grain of a kind unknown to them.
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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:
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“The grain was shown to some botanists, who did not immediately recognize it, but thought it to be either a spartium or a vicia.”
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6
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LEAD, silver, diamonds, glass. I 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.
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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.
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Or oneness of allness: scientific works and social registers: a Goldstein who can’t get in as Goldstein, gets in as Jackson.
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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
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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 ration alize demonology, but just at present we are scarcely far enough advanced to go so far back.
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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.
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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.
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In Science, March 9, 1888, we read of a block of limestone, said to have fallen near Middleburg, 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:
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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 all-ness, 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 Château-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 Château-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
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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 whirl-wind—
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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. 197: 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 so 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:
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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 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 niter, 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 that 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 superconcentration, 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 meteoritic material,” which in the past has been taken as an absolute, dissolving into almost utmost nebulosity. Prof. Bastian explains
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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 New York Times, April 14, 1879, about two bushels of this substance had fallen.
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Something that was said to have fallen at Darmstadt, June 7, 1846; listed by Greg (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1867-416) as “only slag.”
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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 superconstructions. 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 quasiexistence, 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
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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—
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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.
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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.”
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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 Kimberley 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
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cinders said to have fallen—in showery weather—upon a farm, near Ottowa, Ill., Jan. 17, 1857.
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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.
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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 thunderstorm—in the Orne, France, April 24, 1887. Or charcoal: Dr. Angus Smith, in the Lit. and Phil. Soc. of Manchester Memoirs, 2-9146, 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, that 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.
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Our acceptance that coal has fallen from the sky will be via data of resinous substances and bituminous substances, which merge so that they cannot be told apart.
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Resinous substance said to have fallen at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1887 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-94).
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A resinous substance that fell after a fireball? at Neuhaus, Bohemia, Dec. 17, 1824 (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1860-70).
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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).
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Substance that fell, Feb. 17, 18, 19, 1841, at Genoa, Italy, said to have been resinous; said by Arago (Œuvres, 12-469) to have been bituminous matter and sand.
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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 Christiania, 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.”
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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 the admission that carbonaceous matter 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.
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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
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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.
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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 Berthelot, Berzelius, Cloez, Wohler and others these masses are not merely coated with carbonaceous matter, but are carbonaceous throughout, or are permeated throughout. How anyone 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.
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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 Bergelius 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.”
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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:
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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 dullcolored 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.
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Knowledge, 4-134: 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 Ríos, 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 its soluble in water (Records Geol. Survey of India, 44-pt. I-41). A combustible carbonaceous substance that fell with sand at Naples, March 14, 1818 (Amer, Jour. Sci., 1-1-309). Sci. Amer. Sup., 29-11798: That, June 9, 1889, a very friable substance, of a deep, greenish black, 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.
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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 Interme-diateness 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,” as the Scientific American Supplement would say—mysterious disappearance of a sea captain, his family, and the crew—
|
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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 Manet 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.”
|
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Continuity—and that all that we call evolution or progress is attempt to break away from it—
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|
||
That our whole solar system was at one time attempt by planets to break away from a parental nexus and set up as 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;
|
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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;
|
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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—
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All things break one relation only by the establishing of some other relation—
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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, 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 W. 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
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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?
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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 “analagous to fossil waxes.” Or limestone: Of the block of limestone which was reported to have fallen at Middleburg, 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 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
|
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oyster-counter. The striations are very plain: one sees even the hinges where bivalves are joined.
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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.
|
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7
|
||
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.”
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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.
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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:
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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
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|
||
been cloudless, August, 1804, near Toulouse, France, according to a letter from Prof. Pontus to M. Arago. (Comptes Rendus, 3-54.)
|
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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.)
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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 ejecta-menta 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 whirl-wind. 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
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|
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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 of 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, England, 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.
|
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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 a 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;
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|
||
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 18596493, 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 at 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
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circumstances the best adaptation was to laugh the whole thing off and say that someone had soused someone else with a pailful of water in which a few “very young” minnows had been caught up.
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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 seemed 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 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 leirus. Gasterosteus is the stickleback. Altogether I think we have not a sense of total perdition, when we’re damned with the explanation that someone soused someone 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 the 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.
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|
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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 Tennant, 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, 3-339); 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 found 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 the fish were fresh, but others were rotten and without heads.” “Among the number which I 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:
|
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|
||
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 the 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 a 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 shows 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 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” cannot 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 whirl-wind 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 palaeontologists 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:
|
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|
||
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 take 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 known 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 cannot 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 to disprove something that was conceived of, or suspected, in advance.
|
||
“As I suspected,” says this 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 shoveled 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 been upon the ground in the first place. 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, December, 1892, upon Aug. 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.)
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|
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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.
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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.
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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 the 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 other 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 whirl-wind. Then, near the place 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 the 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.
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Again ours is the objection against such selectiveness by a whirl-wind. 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 maybe—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.”
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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.
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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.
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L’Astronomie, 1889-353: Fall 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, 30-193.) 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, 1899125, there is a description of yellow worms and black worms that have been
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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:
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London Times, April 14, 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 snowstorm. In Timb’s Year Book, 1877-26, it is said that, in the winter of 1876, at Christiania, 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 number 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 flealike 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 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 noted frequently in some parts of the 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, March 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
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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.
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Fall of great numbers of larvae of beetles, near Mortagne, France, May, 1858. The larvae were inanimate as if with cold. (Annales Société Entomologique de France, 1858.)
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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.
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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.)
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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 the days preceding, the temperature had been very low”; said to have been of 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.
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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—
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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?
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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.
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As to differences in specific gravity—the yellow larvae that fell in Switzerland January, 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.
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Or that a whirlwind never brought them together and held them together and precipitated them and only them together—
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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 SuperSargasso 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
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