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 snowstorm) 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 roues:
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 conifervae."
Third act:
Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen:
Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited.
Their composition was chiefly of conifervae.
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
"conifervae," 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, "leaf-likeness" is "scale-likeness." In this attempt to
assimilate with the conventional, we are told that the substance is a
mineral mass: that it is like the black scales that cover meteorites.
The scientist who made this "identification" was Von Grotthus. He had
appealed to the god Chemical Analysis. Or the power and glory of
mankind--with which we're not always so impressed--but the gods must
tell us what we want them to tell us. We see again that, though nothing
has identity of its own, anything can be "identified" as anything. Or
there's nothing that's not reasonable, if one snoopeth not into its
exclusions. But here the conflict did not end. Berzelius examined the
substance. He could not find nickel in it. At that time, the presence of
nickel was the "positive" test of meteoritic matter. Whereupon, with a
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
conifervae.
_Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal_, 1847-pt. 1-193:
That March 16, 1846--about the time of a fall of edible substance in
Asia Minor--an olive-gray powder fell at Shanghai. Under the microscope,
it was seen to be an aggregation of hairs of two kinds, black ones and
rather thick white ones. They were supposed to be mineral 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 conifervae.
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--