And Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all
things.
So the members of the British Association. To some of them Prof.
Schwedoff's ideas were like slaps on the back of an environment-denying
turtle: to some of them his heresy was like an offering of meat, raw and
dripping, to milk-fed lambs. Some of them bleated like lambs, and some
of them turled like turtles. We used to crucify, but now we ridicule:
or, in the loss of vigor of all progress, the spike has etherealized
into the laugh.
Sir William Thomson ridiculed the heresy, with the phantomosities of his
era:
That all bodies, such as hailstones, if away from this earth's
atmosphere, would have to move at planetary velocity--which would be
positively reasonable if the pronouncements of St. Isaac were anything
but articles of faith--that a hailstone falling through this earth's
atmosphere, with planetary velocity, would perform 13,000 times as much
work as would raise an equal weight of water one degree centigrade, and
therefore never fall as a hailstone at all; be more than
melted--super-volatalized--
These turls and these bleats of pedantry--though we insist that,
relatively to 1882, these turls and bleats should be regarded as
respectfully as we regard rag dolls that keep infants occupied and
noiseless--it is the survival of rag dolls into maturity that we object
to--so these pious and naive ones who believed that 13,000 times
something could have--that is, in quasi-existence--an exact and
calculable resultant, whereas there is--in quasi-existence--nothing that
can, except by delusion and convenience, be called a unit, in the first
place--whose devotions to St. Isaac required blind belief in formulas of
falling bodies--
Against data that were piling up, in their own time, of slow-falling
meteorites; "milk warm" ones admitted even by Farrington and Merrill; at
least one icy meteorite nowhere denied by the present orthodoxy, a datum
as accessible to Thomson, in 1882, as it is now to us, because it was an
occurrence of 1860. Beans and needles and tacks and a magnet. Needles
and tacks adhere to and systematize relatively to a magnet, but, if some
beans, too, be caught up, they are irreconcilables to this system and
drop right out of it. A member of the Salvation Army may hear over and
over data that seem so memorable to an evolutionist. It seems remarkable
that they do not influence him--one finds that he cannot remember them.
It is incredible that Sir William Thomson had never heard of
slow-falling, cold meteorites. It is simply that he had no power to
remember such irreconcilabilities.
And then Mr. Symons again. Mr. Symons was a man who probably did more
for the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time:
therefore he probably did more to hold back the science of meteorology
than did any other man of his time. In _Nature_, 41-135, Mr. Symons says
that Prof. Schwedoff's ideas are "very droll."
I think that even more amusing is our own acceptance that, not very far
above this earth's surface, is a region that will be the subject of a
whole new science--super-geography--with which we shall immortalize
ourselves in the resentments of the schoolboys of the future--
Pebbles and fragments of meteors and things from Mars and Jupiter and
Azuria: wedges, delayed messages, cannon balls, bricks, nails, coal and
coke and charcoal and offensive old cargoes--things that coat in ice in
some regions and things that get into areas so warm that they
putrefy--or that there are all the climates of geography in
super-geography. I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of
this earth, there often are fields of ice as extensive as those on the
Arctic Ocean--volumes of water in which are many fishes and
frogs--tracts of land covered with caterpillars--
Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk.
The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from
other worlds--and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in
forged messages. Sometime I shall write a guide book to the
Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators, but just at present there wouldn't be
much call for it.
We now have more of our expression upon hail as a concomitant, or more
data of things that have fallen from the sky, with hail.
In general, the expression is:
These things may have been raised from some other part of the earth's
surface, in whirlwinds, or may not have fallen, and may have been upon
the ground, in the first place--but were the hailstones found with them,
raised from some other part of the earth's surface, or were the
hailstones upon the ground, in the first place?
As I said before, this expression is meaningless as to a few instances;
it is reasonable to think of some coincidence between the fall of hail
and the fall of other things: but, inasmuch as there have been a good
many instances,--we begin to suspect that this is not so much a book
we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences. If not
conceivably could very large hailstones and lumps of ice form in this
earth's atmosphere, and so then had to come from external regions, then
other things in or accompanying very large hailstones and lumps of ice
came from external regions--which worries us a little: we may be
instantly translated to the Positive Absolute.
_Cosmos_, 13-120, quotes a Virginia newspaper, that fishes said to have
been catfishes, a foot long, some of them, had fallen, in 1853, at
Norfolk, Virginia, with hail.
Vegetable debris, not only nuclear, but frozen upon the surfaces of
large hailstones, at Toulouse, France, July 28, 1874. (_La Science Pour
Tous_, 1874-270.)
Description of a storm, at Pontiac, Canada, July 11, 1864, in which it
is said that it was not hailstones that fell, but "pieces of ice, from
half an inch to over two inches in diameter" (_Canadian Naturalist_,
2-1-308):
"But the most extraordinary thing is that a respectable farmer, of
undoubted veracity, says he picked up a piece of hail, or ice, in the
center of which was a small green frog."
Storm at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, in which fell hailstones and
pieces of ice (_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1882):
"The foreman of the Novelty Iron Works, of this city, states that in two
large hailstones melted by him were found small living frogs." But the
pieces of ice that fell upon this occasion had a peculiarity that
indicates--though by as bizarre an indication as any we've had yet--that
they had been for a long time motionless or floating somewhere. We'll
take that up soon.
_Living Age_, 52-186:
That, June 30, 1841, fishes, one of which was ten inches long, fell at
Boston; that, eight days later, fishes and ice fell at Derby.
In Timb's _Year Book_, 1842-275, it is said that, at Derby, the fishes
had fallen in enormous numbers; from half an inch to two inches long,
and some considerably larger. In the _Athenaeum_, 1841-542, copied from
the Sheffield _Patriot_, it is said that one of the fishes weighed three
ounces. In several accounts, it is said that, with the fishes, fell many
small frogs and "pieces of half-melted ice." We are told that the frogs
and the fishes had been raised from some other part of the earth's
surface, in a whirlwind; no whirlwind specified; nothing said as to what
part of the earth's surface comes ice, in the month of July--interests
us that the ice is described as "half-melted." In the London _Times_,
July 15, 1841, it is said that the fishes were sticklebacks; that they
had fallen with ice and small frogs, many of which had survived the
fall. We note that, at Dunfermline, three months later (Oct. 7, 1841)
fell many fishes, several inches in length, in a thunderstorm. (London
_Times_, Oct. 12, 1841.)
Hailstones, we don't care so much about. The matter of stratification
seems significant, but we think more of the fall of lumps of ice from
the sky, as possible data of the Super-Sargasso Sea:
Lumps of ice, a foot in circumference, Derbyshire, England, May 12, 1811
(_Annual Register_, 1811-54); cuboidal mass, six inches in diameter,
that fell at Birmingham, 26 days later (Thomson, _Intro. to
Meteorology_, p. 179); size of pumpkins, Bangalore, India, May 22, 1851
(_Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1855-35); masses of ice of a pound and a half
each, New Hampshire, Aug. 13, 1851 (Lummis, _Meteorology_, p. 129);
masses of ice, size of a man's head, in the Delphos tornado (Ferrel,
_Popular Treatise_, p. 428); large as a man's hand, killing thousands of
sheep, Texas, May 3, 1877 (_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1877); "pieces
of ice so large that they could not be grasped in one hand," in a
tornado, in Colorado, June 24, 1877 (_Monthly Weather Review_, June,
1877); lumps of ice four and a half inches long, Richmond, England, Aug.
2, 1879 (_Symons' Met. Mag._, 14-100); mass of ice, 21 inches in
circumference that fell with hail, Iowa, June, 1881 (_Monthly Weather
Review_, June, 1881); "pieces of ice" eight inches long, and an inch and
a half thick, Davenport, Iowa, Aug. 30, 1882 (_Monthly Weather Review_,
Aug., 1882); lump of ice size of a brick; weight two pounds, Chicago,
July 12, 1883 (_Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1883); lumps of ice that
weighed one pound and a half each, India, May (?), 1888 (_Nature_,
37-42); lump of ice weighing four pounds, Texas, Dec. 6, 1893 (_Sc.
Am._, 68-58); lumps of ice one pound in weight, Nov. 14, 1901, in a
tornado, Victoria (_Meteorology of Australia_, p. 34).
Of course it is our acceptance that these masses not only accompanied
tornadoes, but were brought down to this earth by tornadoes.
Flammarion, _The Atmosphere_, p. 34:
Block of ice, weighing four and a half pounds that fell at Cazorta,
Spain, June 15, 1829; block of ice, weighing eleven pounds, at Cette,
France, October, 1844; mass of ice three feet long, three feet wide, and
more than two feet thick, that fell, in a storm, in Hungary, May 8,
1802.
_Scientific American_, 47-119:
That, according to the _Salina Journal_, a mass of ice weighing about 80
pounds had fallen from the sky, near Salina, Kansas, August, 1882. We
are told that Mr. W.J. Hagler, the North Santa Fe merchant became
possessor of it, and packed it in sawdust in his store.
London _Times_, April 7, 1860:
That, upon the 16th of March, 1860, in a snowstorm, in Upper Wasdale,
blocks of ice, so large that at a distance they looked like a flock of
sheep, had fallen.
_Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1851-32:
That a mass of ice about a cubic yard in size had fallen at Candeish,
India, 1828.
Against these data, though, so far as I know, so many of them have never
been assembled together before, there is a silence upon the part of
scientific men that is unusual. Our Super-Sargasso Sea may not be an
unavoidable conclusion, but arrival upon this earth of ice from external
regions does seem to be--except that there must be, be it ever so faint,
a merger. It is in the notion that these masses of ice are only
congealed hailstones. We have data against this notion, as applied to
all our instances, but the explanation has been offered, and, it seems
to me, may apply in some instances. In the _Bull. Soc. Astro. de
France_, 20-245, it is said of blocks of ice the size of decanters that
had fallen at Tunis that they were only masses of congealed hailstones.
London _Times_, Aug. 4, 1857.
That a block of ice, described as "pure" ice, weighing 25 pounds, had
been found in the meadow of Mr. Warner, of Cricklewood. There had been a
storm the day before. As in some of our other instances, no one had seen
this object fall from the sky. It was found after the storm: that's all
that can be said about it.
Letter from Capt. Blakiston, communicated by Gen. Sabine, to the Royal
Society (_London Roy. Soc. Proc._, 10-468):
That, Jan. 14, 1860, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice had fallen upon
Capt. Blakiston's vessel--that it was not hail. "It was not hail, but
irregular-shaped pieces of solid ice of different dimensions, up to the
size of half a brick."
According to the _Advertiser-Scotsman_, quoted by the Edinburgh _New
Philosophical Magazine_, 47-371, an irregular-shaped mass of ice fell at
Ord, Scotland, August, 1849, after "an extraordinary peal of thunder."
It is said that this was homogeneous ice, except in a small part, which
looked like congealed hailstones.
The mass was about 20 feet in circumference.
The story, as told in the London _Times_, Aug. 14, 1849, is that, upon
the evening of the 13th of August, 1849, after a loud peal of thunder, a
mass of ice said to have been 20 feet in circumference, had fallen upon
the estate of Mr. Moffat, of Balvullich, Ross-shire. It is said that
this object fell alone, or without hailstones.
Altogether, though it is not so strong for the Super-Sargasso Sea, I
think this is one of our best expressions upon external origins. That
large blocks of ice could form in the moisture of this earth's
atmosphere is about as likely as that blocks of stone could form in a
dust whirl. Of course, if ice or water comes to this earth from external
sources, we think of at least minute organisms in it, and on, with our
data, to frogs, fishes; on to anything that's thinkable, coming from
external sources. It's of great importance to us to accept that large
lumps of ice have fallen from the sky, but what we desire most--perhaps
because of our interest in its archaeologic and palaeontologic
treasures--is now to be through with tentativeness and probation, and
to take the Super-Sargasso Sea into full acceptance in our more advanced
fold of the chosen of this twentieth century.
In the _Report of the British Association_, 1855-37, it is said that, at
Poorhundur, India, Dec. 11, 1854, flat pieces of ice, many of them
weighing several pounds--each, I suppose--had fallen from the sky. They
are described as "large ice-flakes."
Vast fields of ice in the Super-Arctic regions, or strata, of the
Super-Sargasso Sea. When they break up, their fragments are flake-like.
In our acceptance, there are aerial ice-fields that are remote from this
earth; that break up, fragments grinding against one another, rolling in
vapor and water, of different constituency in different regions, forming
slowly as stratified hailstones--but that there are ice-fields near this
earth, that break up into just such flat pieces of ice as cover any pond
or river when ice of a pond or river is broken, and are sometimes soon
precipitated to the earth, in this familiar flat formation.
_Symons' Met. Mag._, 43-154:
A correspondent writes that, at Braemar, July 2, 1908, when the sky was
clear overhead, and the sun shining, flat pieces of ice fell--from
somewhere. The sun was shining, but something was going on somewhere:
thunder was heard.
Until I saw the reproduction of a photograph in the _Scientific
American_, Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be,
say, at least ten or twenty miles away from this earth, and invisible,
to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been
reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by
the _Scientific American_ is of an aggregation supposed to be clouds,
presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are they. The writer says
that they looked to him like "a field of broken ice." Beneath is a
picture of a conventional field of ice, floating ordinarily in water.
The resemblance between the two pictures is striking--nevertheless, it
seems to me incredible that the first of the photographs could be of an
aerial ice-field, or that gravitation could cease to act at only a mile
or so from this earth's surface--
Unless:
The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.
Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen
miles outward--but that gravitation must be rhythmic.
Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed
quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and
astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the
punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all
the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only
insecure approximations.
We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping arrogance,
to Herbert Spencer's chapters upon the rhythm of all phenomena.
If everything else--light from the stars, heat from the sun, the winds
and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; demands and
supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic reactions and
religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the ticking of clocks;
and arrival and departure of the seasons--if everything else is
variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed and
formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like all other
illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is intermediatism to
accept that, though gravitation may approximate higher to invariability
than do the winds, for instance, it must be somewhere between the
Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here then we are not much
impressed with the opposition of physicists and astronomers, fearing, a
little mournfully, that their language is of expiring sibilations.
So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far
away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be seen in
detail. For description of what I call a "blur," see _Pop. Sci. News_,
February, 1884--sky, in general, unusually clear, but, near the sun, "a
white, slightly curdled haze, which was dazzlingly bright."
We accept that sometimes fields of ice pass between the sun and the
earth: that many strata of ice, or very thick fields of ice, or
superimposed fields would obscure the sun--that there have been
occasions when the sun was eclipsed by fields of ice:
Flammarion, _The Atmosphere_, p. 394:
That a profound darkness came upon the city of Brussels, June 18, 1839:
There fell flat pieces of ice, an inch long.
Intense darkness at Aitkin, Minn., April 2, 1889: sand and "solid chunks
of ice" reported to have fallen (_Science_, April 19, 1889).
In _Symons' Meteorological Magazine_, 32-172, are outlined rough-edged
but smooth-surfaced pieces of ice that fell at Manassas, Virginia, Aug.
10, 1897. They look as much like the roughly broken fragments of a
smooth sheet of ice--as ever have roughly broken fragments of a smooth
sheet of ice looked. About two inches across, and one inch thick. In
_Cosmos_, 3-116, it is said that, at Rouen, July 5, 1853, fell
irregular-shaped pieces of ice, about the size of a hand, described as
looking as if all had been broken from one enormous block of ice. That,
I think, was an aerial iceberg. In the awful density, or almost absolute
stupidity of the 19th century, it never occurred to anybody to look for
traces of polar bears or of seals upon these fragments.
Of course, seeing what we want to see, having been able to gather these
data only because they are in agreement with notions formed in advance,
we are not so respectful to our own notions as to a similar impression
forced upon an observer who had no theory or acceptance to support. In
general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this
should not be taken as an absolute.
_Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1894:
That, from the Weather Bureau, of Portland, Oregon, a tornado, of June
3, 1894, was reported.
Fragments of ice fell from the sky.
They averaged three to four inches square, and about an inch thick. In
length and breadth they had the smooth surfaces required by our
acceptance: and, according to the writer in the _Review_, "gave the
impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and
suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."
This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the "damned," or before
we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried condemnation by
infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied--but without comment--in the
_Scientific American_, 71-371.
Our theology is something like this:
Of course we ought to be damned--but we revolt against adjudication by
infants, turtles, and lambs.
We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult department of
super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There's a lesson to me in
the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our opposition is in the
clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the
imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become
the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a
few miles above this earth--then the shining of the sun, and the ice
partly melting--that note upon the ice that fell at Derby--water
trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I
seemed to look up and so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like
stalactites from a flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at
the under side of an aerial ice-lump, and seemed to see a papillation
similar to that observed by a calf at times. But then--but then--if
icicles should form upon the under side of a sheet of aerial ice, that
would be by the falling of water toward this earth; an icicle is of
course an expression of gravitation--and, if water melting from ice
should fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an
icicle could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where
everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the
ice does not, because the ice is heavier--that is, in masses. That
notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at
present.
Our expression upon icicles:
A vast field of aerial ice--it is inert to this earth's gravitation--but
by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth,
and is susceptible to gravitation--by cohesion with the main mass, this
part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms
icicles--then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in
fragments that are protrusive with icicles.
Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque,
Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said (_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1882)
that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circumference,
the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters--that upon some of
them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these
objects were not hailstones.
The only merger is that of knobby hailstones, or of large hailstones
with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger
with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to
orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize--not
forming by accretion--in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of
such hailstones, see _Nature_, 61-594. Note the size--"some of them the
size of turkeys' eggs."
It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen,
as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the under side
of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations.
_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1889:
That, at Oswego, N.Y., June 11, 1889, according to the Turin (N.Y.)
_Leader_, there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that "resembled
the fragments of icicles."
_Monthly Weather Review_, 29-506:
That on Florence Island, St. Lawrence River, Aug. 8, 1901, with ordinary
hail, fell pieces of ice "formed like icicles, the size and shape of
lead pencils that had been cut into sections about three-eighths of an
inch in length."
So our data of the Super-Sargasso Sea, and its Arctic region: and, for
weeks at a time, an ice field may hang motionless over a part of this
earth's surface--the sun has some effect upon it, but not much until
late in the afternoon, I should say--part of it has sagged, but is held
up by cohesion with the main mass--whereupon we have such an occurrence
as would have been a little uncanny to us once upon a time--or fall of
water from a cloudless sky, day after day, in one small part of this
earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun's rays had had time
for their effects:
_Monthly Weather Review_, October, 1886:
That, according to the Charlotte _Chronicle_, Oct. 21, 1886, for three
weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N.C.,
localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o'clock;
that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell
upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.
This is the newspaper account, and, as such, it seems in the depths of
the unchosen, either by me or any other expression of the Salvation
Army. The account by the Signal Service observer, at Charlotte,
published in the _Review_, follows:
"An unusual phenomenon was witnessed on the 21st: having been informed
that, for some weeks prior to date, rain had been falling daily, after 3
P.M., on a particular spot, near two trees, corner of 9th and D streets,
I visited the place, and saw precipitation in the form of rain drops at
4:47 and 4:55 P.M., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I
again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25 P.M., a light shower of
rain fell from a cloudless sky.... Sometimes the precipitation falls
over an area of half an acre, but always appears to center at these two
trees, and when lightest occurs there only."
14
We see conventionally. It is not only that we think and act and speak
and dress alike, because of our surrender to social attempt at Entity,
in which we are only super-cellular. We see what it is "proper" that we
should see. It is orthodox enough to say that a horse is not a horse, to
an infant--any more than is an orange an orange to the unsophisticated.
It's interesting to walk along a street sometimes and look at things and
wonder what they'd look like, if we hadn't been taught to see horses and
trees and houses as horses and trees and houses. I think that to
super-sight they are local stresses merging indistinguishably into one
another, in an all-inclusive nexus.
I think that it would be credible enough to say that many times have
Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria crossed telescopic fields of vision,
and were not even seen--because it wouldn't be proper to see them; it
wouldn't be respectable, and it wouldn't be respectful: it would be
insulting to old bones to see them: it would bring on evil influences
from the relics of St. Isaac to see them.
But our data:
Of vast worlds that are orbitless, or that are navigable, or that are
adrift in inter-planetary tides and currents: the data that we shall
have of their approach, in modern times, within five or six miles of
this earth--
But then their visits, or approaches, to other planets, or to other of
the few regularized bodies that have surrendered to the attempted Entity
of this solar system as a whole--
The question that we can't very well evade:
Have these other worlds, or super-constructions, ever been seen by
astronomers?
I think there would not be much approximation to realness in taking
refuge in the notion of astronomers who stare and squint and see only
that which it is respectable and respectful to see. It is all very well
to say that astronomers are hypnotics, and that an astronomer looking at
the moon is hypnotized by the moon, but our acceptance is that the
bodies of this present expression often visit the moon, or cross it, or
are held in temporary suspension near it--then some of them must often
have been within the diameter of an astronomer's hypnosis.
Our general expression:
That, upon the oceans of this earth, there are regularized vessels, but
also that there are tramp vessels:
That, upon the super-ocean, there are regularized planets, but also that
there are tramp worlds:
That astronomers are like mercantile purists who would deny commercial
vagabondage.
Our acceptance is that vast celestial vagabonds have been excluded by
astronomers, primarily because their irresponsibilities are an affront
to the pure and the precise, or to attempted positivism; and secondarily
because they have not been seen so very often. The planets steadily
reflect the light of the sun: upon this uniformity a system that we call
Primary Astronomy has been built up; but now the subject-matter of
Advanced Astronomy is data of celestial phenomena that are sometimes
light and sometimes dark, varying like some of the satellites of
Jupiter, but with a wider range. However, light or dark, they have been
seen and reported so often that the only important reason for their
exclusion is--that they don't fit in.
With dark bodies that are probably external to our own solar system, I
have, in the provincialism that no one can escape, not much concern.
Dark bodies afloat in outer space would have been damned a few years
ago, but now they're sanctioned by Prof. Barnard--and, if he says
they're all right, you may think of them without the fear of doing
something wrong or ridiculous--the close kinship we note so often
between the evil and the absurd--I suppose by the ridiculous I mean the
froth of evil. The dark companion of Algol, for instance. Though that's
a clear case of celestial miscegenation, the purists, or positivists,
admit that's so. In the _Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science_, 1915-394, Prof. Barnard writes of an object--he calls it an
"object"--in Cephus. His idea is that there are dark, opaque bodies
outside this solar system. But in the _Astrophysical Journal_, 1916-1,
he modifies into regarding them as "dark nebulae." That's not so
interesting.
We accept that Venus, for instance, has often been visited by other
worlds, or by super-constructions, from which come ciders and coke and
coal; that sometimes these things have reflected light and have been
seen from this earth--by professional astronomers. It will be noted that
throughout this chapter our data are accursed Brahmins--as, by hypnosis
and inertia, we keep on and keep on saying, just as a good many of the
scientists of the 19th century kept on and kept on admitting the power
of the system that preceded them--or Continuity would be smashed.
There's a big chance here for us to be instantaneously translated to the
Positive Absolute--oh, well--
What I emphasize here is that our damned data are observations by
astronomers of the highest standing, excommunicated by astronomers of
similar standing--but backed up by the dominant spirit of their era--to
which all minds had to equilibrate or be negligible, unheard, submerged.
It would seem sometimes, in this book, as if our revolts were against
the dogmatisms and pontifications of single scientists of eminence. This
is only a convenience, because it seems necessary to personify. If we
look over _Philosophical Transactions_, or the publications of the Royal
Astronomical Society, for instance, we see that Herschel, for instance,
was as powerless as any boy stargazer, to enforce acceptance of any
observation of his that did not harmonize with the system that was
growing up as independently of him and all other astronomers, as a phase
in the development of an embryo compels all cells to take on appearances
concordantly with the design and the predetermined progress and schedule
of the whole.
Visitors to Venus:
Evans, _Ways of the Planets_, p. 140:
That, in 1645, a body large enough to look like a satellite was seen
near Venus. Four times in the first half of the 18th century, a similar
observation was reported. The last report occurred in 1767.
A large body has been seen--seven times, according to _Science Gossip_,
1886-178--near Venus. At least one astronomer, Houzeau, accepted these
observations and named the--world, planet, super-construction--"Neith."
His views are mentioned "in passing, but without endorsement," in the
_Trans. N.Y. Acad._, 5-249.
Houzeau or someone writing for the magazine-section of a Sunday
newspaper--outer darkness for both alike. A new satellite in this solar
system might be a little disturbing--though the formulas of Laplace,
which were considered final in his day, have survived the admittance of
five or six hundred bodies not included in those formulas--a satellite
to Venus might be a little disturbing, but would be explained--but a
large body approaching a planet--staying awhile--going away--coming back
some other time--anchoring, as it were--
Azuria is pretty bad, but Azuria is no worse than Neith.
_Astrophysical Journal_, 1-127:
A light-reflecting body, or a bright spot near Mars: seen Nov. 25, 1894,
by Prof. Pickering and others, at the Lowell Observatory, above an
unilluminated part of Mars--self-luminous, it would seem--thought to
have been a cloud--but estimated to have been about twenty miles away
from the planet.
Luminous spot seen moving across the disk of Mercury, in 1799, by
Harding and Schroeter. (_Monthly Notices of the R.A.S._, 38-338.)
In the first Bulletin issued by the Lowell Observatory, in 1903, Prof.
Lowell describes a body that was seen on the terminator of Mars, May
20, 1903. On May 27, it was "suspected." If still there, it had moved,
we are told, about 300 miles--"probably a dust cloud."
Very conspicuous and brilliant spots seen on the disk of Mars, October
and November, 1911. (_Popular Astronomy_, Vol. 19, No. 10.)
So one of them accepted six or seven observations that were in
agreement, except that they could not be regularized, upon a
world--planet--satellite--and he gave it a name. He named it "Neith."