Prof. Douglas (_Saturday Review_, Nov. 24, 1883):
"Whatever may have been their motive, the cup-markers showed a decided
liking for arranging their sculpturings in regularly spaced rows."
That cup marks are an archaic form of inscription was first suggested by
Canon Greenwell many years ago. But more specifically adumbratory to our
own expression are the observations of Rivett-Carnac (_Jour. Roy.
Asiatic Soc._, 1903-515):
That the Braille system of raised dots is an inverted arrangement of cup
marks: also that there are strong resemblances to the Morse code. But no
tame and systematized archaeologist can do more than casually point out
resemblances, and merely suggest that strings of cup marks look like
messages, because--China, Switzerland, Algeria, America--if messages
they be, there seems to be no escape from attributing one origin to
them--then, if messages they be, I accept one external origin, to which
the whole surface of this earth was accessible, for them.
Something else that we emphasize:
That rows of cup marks have often been likened to footprints.
But, in this similitude, their unilinear arrangement must be
disregarded--of course often they're mixed up in every way, but
arrangement in single lines is very common. It is odd that they should
so often be likened to footprints: I suppose there are exceptional
cases, but unless it's something that hops on one foot, or a cat going
along a narrow fence-top, I don't think of anything that makes
footprints one directly ahead of another--Cop, in a station house,
walking a chalk line, perhaps.
Upon the Witch's Stone, near Ratho, Scotland, there are twenty-four
cups, varying in size from one and a half to three inches in diameter,
arranged in approximately straight lines. Locally it is explained that
these are tracks of dogs' feet (_Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotland_, 2-4-79).
Similar marks are scattered bewilderingly all around the Witch's
Stone--like a frenzy of telegraphing, or like messages repeating and
repeating, trying to localize differently.
In Inverness-shire, cup marks are called "fairies' footmarks." At
Valna's church, Norway, and St. Peter's, Ambleteuse, there are such
marks, said to be horses' hoofprints. The rocks of Clare, Ireland, are
marked with prints supposed to have been made by a mythical cow
(_Folklore_, 21-184).
We now have such a ghost of a thing that I'd not like to be interpreted
as offering it as a datum: it simply illustrates what I mean by the
notion of symbols, like cups, or like footprints, which, if like those
of horses or cows, are the reverse of, or the negatives of, cups--of
symbols that are regularly received somewhere upon this earth--steep,
conical hill, somewhere, I think--but that have often alighted in wrong
places--considerably to the mystification of persons waking up some
morning to find them upon formerly blank spaces.
An ancient record--still worse, an ancient Chinese record--of a
courtyard of a palace--dwellers of the palace waking up one morning,
finding the courtyard marked with tracks like the footprints of an
ox--supposed that the devil did it. (_Notes and Queries_, 9-6-225.)
16.
Angels.
Hordes upon hordes of them.
Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling whiffs of
spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pictured so often.
It may be that the Milky Way is a composition of stiff, frozen,
finally-static, absolute angels. We shall have data of little Milky
Ways, moving swiftly; or data of hosts of angels, not absolute, or still
dynamic. I suspect, myself, that the fixed stars are really fixed, and
that the minute motions said to have been detected in them are
illusions. I think that the fixed stars are absolutes. Their twinkling
is only the interpretation by an intermediatist state of them. I think
that soon after Leverrier died, a new fixed star was discovered--that,
if Dr. Gray had stuck to his story of the thousands of fishes from one
pail of water, had written upon it, lectured upon it, taken to street
corners, to convince the world that, whether conceivable or not, his
explanation was the only true explanation: had thought of nothing but
this last thing at night and first thing in the morning--his
obituary--another "nova" reported in _Monthly Notices_.
I think that Milky Ways, of an inferior, or dynamic, order, have often
been seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the phenomena that we
shall now consider are not angels at all. We are simply feeling around,
trying to find out what we can accept. Some of our data indicate hosts
of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space--but then
data of long, lean, hungry ones. I think that there are, out in
inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of
celestial ravagers--which have come here and pounced upon civilizations
of the past, cleaning them up all but their bones, or temples and
monuments--for which later historians have invented exclusionist
histories. But if something now has a legal right to us, and can
enforce its proprietorship, they've been warned off. It's the way of all
exploitation. I should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're
conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our
own nobler and higher instincts.
Against these notions is the same sense of finality that opposes all
advance. It's why we rate acceptance as a better adaptation than belief.
Opposing us is the strong belief that, as to inter-planetary phenomena,
virtually everything has been found out. Sense of finality and illusion
of homogeneity. But that what is called advancing knowledge is violation
of the sense of blankness.
A drop of water. Once upon a time water was considered so homogeneous
that it was thought of as an element. The microscope--and not only that
the supposititiously elementary was seen to be of infinite diversity,
but that in its protoplasmic life there were new orders of beings.
Or the year 1491--and a European looking westward over the ocean--his
feeling that that suave western droop was unbreakable; that gods of
regularity would not permit that smooth horizon to be disturbed by
coasts or spotted with islands. The unpleasantness of even contemplating
such a state--wide, smooth west, so clean against the sky--spotted with
islands--geographic leprosy.
But coasts and islands and Indians and bison, in the seemingly vacant
west: lakes, mountains, rivers--
One looks up at the sky: the relative homogeneity of the
relatively unexplored: one thinks of only a few kinds of phenomena.
But the acceptance is forced upon me that there are modes and modes
and modes of inter-planetary existence: things as different from
planets and comets and meteors as Indians are from bison and prairie
dogs: a super-geography--or celestiography--of vast stagnant regions,
but also of Super-Niagaras and Ultra-Mississippis: and a
super-sociology--voyagers and tourists and ravagers: the hunted and the
hunting: the super-mercantile, the super-piratic, the super-evangelical.
Sense of homogeneity, or our positivist illusion of the unknown--and the
fate of all positivism.
Astronomy and the academic.
Ethics and the abstract.
The universal attempt to formulate or to regularize--an attempt that can
be made only by disregarding or denying.
Or all things disregard or deny that which will eventually invade and
destroy them--
Until comes the day when some one thing shall say, and enforce upon
Infinitude:
"Thus far shalt thou go: here is absolute demarcation."
The final utterance:
"There is only I."
In the _Monthly Notices of the R.A.S._, 11-48, there is a letter from
the Rev. W. Read:
That, upon the 4th of September, 1851, at 9:30 A.M., he had seen a host
of self-luminous bodies, passing the field of his telescope, some slowly
and some rapidly. They appeared to occupy a zone several degrees in
breadth. The direction of most of them was due east to west, but some
moved from north to south. The numbers were tremendous. They were
observed for six hours.
Editor's note:
"May not these appearances be attributed to an abnormal state of the
optic nerves of the observer?"
In _Monthly Notices_, 12-38, Mr. Read answers that he had been a
diligent observer, with instruments of a superior order, for about 28
years--"but I have never witnessed such an appearance before." As to
illusion he says that two other members of his family had seen the
objects.
The Editor withdraws his suggestion.
We know what to expect. Almost absolutely--in an existence that is
essentially Hibernian--we can predict the past--that is, look over
something of this kind, written in 1851, and know what to expect from
the Exclusionists later. If Mr. Read saw a migration of dissatisfied
angels, numbering millions, they must merge away, at least subjectively,
with commonplace terrestrial phenomena--of course disregarding Mr.
Read's probable familiarity, of 28 years' duration, with the
commonplaces of terrestrial phenomena.
_Monthly Notices_, 12-183:
Letter from Rev. W.R. Dawes:
That he had seen similar objects--and in the month of September--that
they were nothing but seeds floating in the air.
In the _Report of the British Association_, 1852-235, there is a
communication from Mr. Read to Prof. Baden-Powell:
That the objects that had been seen by him and by Mr. Dawes were not
similar. He denies that he had seen seeds floating in the air. There had
been little wind, and that had come from the sea, where seeds would not
be likely to have origin. The objects that he had seen were round and
sharply defined, and with none of the feathery appearance of
thistledown. He then quotes from a letter from C.B. Chalmers, F.R.A.S.,
who had seen a similar stream, a procession, or migration, except that
some of the bodies were more elongated--or lean and hungry--than
globular.
He might have argued for sixty-five years. He'd have impressed
nobody--of importance. The super-motif, or dominant, of his era, was
Exclusionism, and the notion of seeds in the air assimilates--with due
disregards--with that dominant.
Or pageantries here upon our earth, and things looking down upon us--and
the Crusades were only dust clouds, and glints of the sun on shining
armor were only particles of mica in dust clouds. I think it was a
Crusade that Read saw--but that it was right, relatively to the year
1851, to say that it was only seeds in the wind, whether the wind blew
from the sea or not. I think of things that were luminous with religious
zeal, mixed up, like everything else in Intermediateness, with black
marauders and from gray to brown beings of little personal ambitions.
There may have been a Richard Coeur de Lion, on his way to right
wrongs in Jupiter. It was right, relatively to 1851, to say that he was
a seed of a cabbage.
Prof. Coffin, U.S.N. (_Jour. Frank. Inst._, 88-151):
That, during the eclipse of August, 1869, he had noted the passage,
across his telescope, of several bright flakes resembling thistleblows,
floating in the sunlight. But the telescope was so focused that, if
these things were distinct, they must have been so far away from this
earth that the difficulties of orthodoxy remain as great, one way or
another, no matter what we think they were--
They were "well-defined," says Prof. Coffin.
Henry Waldner (_Nature_, 5-304):
That, April 27, 1863, he had seen great numbers of small, shining bodies
passing from west to east. He had notified Dr. Wolf, of the Observatory
of Zurich, who "had convinced himself of this strange phenomenon." Dr.
Wolf had told him that similar bodies had been seen by Sig. Capocci, of
the Capodimonte Observatory, at Naples, May 11, 1845.
The shapes were of great diversity--or different aspects of similar
shapes?
Appendages were seen upon some of them.
We are told that some were star-shaped, with transparent appendages.
I think, myself, it was a Mohammed and his Hegira. May have been only
his harem. Astonishing sensation: afloat in space with ten million wives
around one. Anyway, it would seem that we have considerable advantage
here, inasmuch as seeds are not in season in April--but the pulling back
to earth, the bedraggling by those sincere but dull ones of some time
ago. We have the same stupidity--necessary, functioning stupidity--of
attribution of something that was so rare that an astronomer notes only
one instance between 1845 and 1863, to an every-day occurrence--
Or Mr. Waldner's assimilative opinion that he had seen only ice
crystals.
Whether they were not very exclusive veils of a super-harem, or planes
of a very light material, we have an impression of star-shaped things
with transparent appendages that have been seen in the sky.
Hosts of small bodies--black, this time--that were seen by the
astronomers Herrick, Buys-Ballot, and De Cuppis (_L'Annee Scientifique_,
1860-25); vast numbers of bodies that were seen by M. Lamey, to cross
the moon (_L'Annee Scientifique_, 1874-62); another instance of dark
ones; prodigious number of dark, spherical bodies reported by Messier,
June 17, 1777 (Arago, _OEuvres_, 9-38); considerable number of
luminous bodies which appeared to move out from the sun, in diverse
directions; seen at Havana, during eclipse of the sun, May 15, 1836, by
Prof. Auber (Poey); M. Poey cites a similar instance, of Aug. 3, 1886;
M. Lotard's opinion that they were birds (_L'Astronomie_, 1886-391);
large number of small bodies crossing disk of the sun, some swiftly,
some slowly; most of them globular, but some seemingly triangular, and
some of more complicated structure; seen by M. Trouvelet, who, whether
seeds, insects, birds, or other commonplace things, had never seen
anything resembling these forms (_L'Annee Scientifique_, 1885-8); report
from the Rio de Janeiro Observatory, of vast numbers of bodies crossing
the sun, some of them luminous and some of them dark, from some time in
December, 1875, until Jan. 22, 1876 (_La Nature_, 1876-384).
Of course, at a distance, any form is likely to look round or roundish:
but we point out that we have notes upon the seeming of more complex
forms. In _L'Astronomie_, 1886-70, is recorded M. Briguiere's
observation, at Marseilles, April 15 and April 25, 1883, upon the
crossing of the sun by bodies that were irregular in form. Some of them
moved as if in alignment.
Letter from Sir Robert Inglis to Col. Sabine (_Rept. Brit. Assoc._,
1849-17):
That, at 3 P.M., Aug. 8, 1849, at Gais, Switzerland, Inglis had seen
thousands and thousands of brilliant white objects, like snowflakes in a
cloudless sky. Though this display lasted about twenty-five minutes, not
one of these seeming snowflakes was seen to fall. Inglis says that his
servant "fancied" that he had seen something like wings on
these--whatever they were. Upon page 18, of the _Report_, Sir John
Herschel says that, in 1845 or 1846, his attention had been attracted by
objects of considerable size, in the air, seemingly not far away. He had
looked at them through a telescope. He says that they were masses of
hay, not less than a yard or two in diameter. Still there are some
circumstances that interest me. He says that, though no less than a
whirlwind could have sustained these masses, the air about him was calm.
"No doubt wind prevailed at the spot, but there was no roaring noise."
None of these masses fell within his observation or knowledge. To walk a
few fields away and find out more would seem not much to expect from a
man of science, but it is one of our superstitions, that such a seeming
trifle is just what--by the Spirit of an Era, we'll call it--one is not
permitted to do. If those things were not masses of hay, and if Herschel
had walked a little and found out, and had reported that he had seen
strange objects in the air--that report, in 1846, would have been as
misplaced as the appearance of a tail upon an embryo still in its
gastrula era. I have noticed this inhibition in my own case many times.
Looking back--why didn't I do this or that little thing that would have
cost so little and have meant so much? Didn't belong to that era of my
own development.
_Nature_, 22-64:
That, at Kattenau, Germany, about half an hour before sunrise, March 22,
1880, "an enormous number of luminous bodies rose from the horizon, and
passed in a horizontal direction from east to west." They are described
as having appeared in a zone or belt. "They shone with a remarkably
brilliant light."
So they've thrown lassos over our data to bring them back to earth. But
they're lassos that cannot tighten. We can't pull out of them: we may
step out of them, or lift them off. Some of us used to have an
impression of Science sitting in calm, just judgment: some of us now
feel that a good many of our data have been lynched. If a Crusade,
perhaps from Mars to Jupiter, occur in the autumn--"seeds." If a Crusade
or outpouring of celestial vandals is seen from this earth in the
spring--"ice crystals." If we have record of a race of aerial beings,
perhaps with no substantial habitat, seen by someone in
India--"locusts."
This will be disregarded:
If locusts fly high, they freeze and fall in thousands.
_Nature_, 47-581:
Locusts that were seen in the mountains of India, at a height of 12,750
feet--"in swarms and dying by thousands."
But no matter whether they fly high or fly low, no one ever wonders
what's in the air when locusts are passing overhead, because of the
falling of stragglers. I have especially looked this matter up--no
mystery when locusts are flying overhead--constant falling of
stragglers.
_Monthly Notices_, 30-135:
"An unusual phenomenon noticed by Lieut. Herschel, Oct. 17 and 18, 1870,
while observing the sun, at Bangalore, India."
Lieut. Herschel had noticed dark shadows crossing the sun--but away from
the sun there were luminous, moving images. For two days bodies passed
in a continuous stream, varying in size and velocity.
The Lieutenant tries to explain, as we shall see, but he says:
"As it was, the continuous flight, for two whole days, in such numbers,
in the upper regions of the air, of beasts that left no stragglers, is a
wonder of natural history, if not of astronomy."
He tried different focusing--he saw wings--perhaps he saw planes. He
says that he saw upon the objects either wings or phantom-like
appendages.
Then he saw something that was so bizarre that, in the fullness of his
nineteenth-centuriness, he writes:
"There was no longer doubt: they were locusts or flies of some sort."
One of them had paused.
It had hovered.
Then it had whisked off.
The Editor says that at that time "countless locusts had descended upon
certain parts of India."
We now have an instance that is extraordinary in several
respects--super-voyagers or super-ravagers; angels, ragamuffins,
crusaders, emigrants, aeronauts, or aerial elephants, or bison or
dinosaurs--except that I think the thing had planes or wings--one of
them has been photographed. It may be that in the history of photography
no more extraordinary picture than this has ever been taken.
_L'Astronomie_, 1885-347:
That, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico, Aug. 12, 1883, about
2,500 meters above sea level, were seen a large number of small luminous
bodies, entering upon the disk of the sun. M. Bonilla telegraphed to the
Observatories of the City of Mexico and of Puebla. Word came back that
the bodies were not visible there. Because of this parallax, M. Bonilla
placed the bodies "relatively near the earth." But when we find out what
he called "relatively near the earth"--birds or bugs or hosts of a
Super-Tamerlane or army of a celestial Richard Coeur de Lion--our
heresies rejoice anyway. His estimate is "less distance than the moon."
One of them was photographed. See _L'Astronomie_, 1885-349. The
photograph shows a long body surrounded by indefinite structures, or by
the haze of wings or planes in motion.
_L'Astronomie_, 1887-66;
Signer Ricco, of the Observatory of Palermo, writes that, Nov. 30, 1880,
at 8:30 o'clock in the morning, he was watching the sun, when he saw,
slowly traversing its disk, bodies in two long, parallel lines, and a
shorter, parallel line. The bodies looked winged to him. But so large
were they that he had to think of large birds. He thought of cranes.
He consulted ornithologists, and learned that the configuration of
parallel lines agrees with the flight-formation of cranes. This was in
1880: anybody now living in New York City, for instance, would tell him
that also it is a familiar formation of aeroplanes. But, because of data
of focus and subtended angles, these beings or objects must have been
high.
Sig. Ricco argues that condors have been known to fly three or four
miles high, and that heights reached by other birds have been estimated
at two or three miles. He says that cranes have been known to fly so
high that they have been lost to view.
Our own acceptance, in conventional terms, is that there is not a bird
of this earth that would not freeze to death at a height of more than
four miles: that if condors fly three or four miles high, they are birds
that are especially adapted to such altitudes.
Sig. Ricco's estimate is that these objects or beings or cranes must
have been at least five and a half miles high.
17
The vast dark thing that looked like a poised crow of unholy dimensions.
Assuming that I shall ever have any readers, let him, or both of them,
if I shall ever have such popularity as that, note how dim that bold
black datum is at the distance of only two chapters.
The question:
Was it a thing or the shadow of a thing?
Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the
science of astronomy. But the dimness of the datum of only two chapters
ago. The carved stone disk of Tarbes, and the rain that fell every
afternoon for twenty--if I haven't forgotten, myself, whether it was
twenty-three or twenty-five days!--upon one small area. We are all
Thomsons, with brains that have smooth and slippery, though corrugated,
surfaces--or that all intellection is associative--or that we remember
that which correlates with a dominant--and a few chapters go by, and
there's scarcely an impression that hasn't slid off our smooth and
slippery brains, of Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan." There are two
ways by which irreconcilables can be remembered--if they can be
correlated in a system more nearly real than the system that rejects
them--and by repetition and repetition and repetition.
Vast black thing like a crow poised over the moon.
The datum is so important to us, because it enforces, in another field,
our acceptance that dark bodies of planetary size traverse this solar
system.
Our position:
That the things have been seen:
Also that their shadows have been seen.
Vast black thing poised like a crow over the moon. So far it is a single
instance. By a single instance, we mean the negligible.
In _Popular Science_, 34-158, Serviss tells of a shadow that Schroeter
saw, in 1788, in the lunar Alps. First he saw a light. But then, when
this region was illuminated, he saw a round shadow where the light had
been.
Our own expression:
That he saw a luminous object near the moon: that that part of the moon
became illuminated, and the object was lost to view; but that then its
shadow underneath was seen.
Serviss explains, of course. Otherwise he'd not be Prof. Serviss. It's a
little contest in relative approximations to realness. Prof. Serviss
thinks that what Schroeter saw was the "round" shadow of a mountain--in
the region that had become lighted. He assumes that Schroeter never
looked again to see whether the shadow could be attributed to a
mountain. That's the crux: conceivably a mountain could cast a
round--and that means detached--shadow, in the lighted part of the moon.
Prof. Serviss could, of course, explain why he disregards the light in
the first place--maybe it had always been there "in the first place." If
he couldn't explain, he'd still be an amateur.