And that then would occur a fall of matter from such a world, or rise of
matter from this earth to a nearby world, or both fall and rise, or
exchange of matter--process known to Advanced Seismology as
celestio-metathesis--
Except that--if matter from some other world--and it would be like
someone to get it into his head that we absolutely deny gravitation,
just because we cannot accept orthodox dogmas--except that, if matter
from another world, filling the sky of this earth, generally, as to a
hemisphere, or locally, should be attracted to this earth, it would
seem thinkable that the whole thing should drop here, and not merely its
surface-materials.
Objects upon a ship's bottom. From time to time they drop to the bottom
of the ocean. The ship does not.
Or, like our acceptance upon dripping from aerial ice-fields, we think
of only a part of a nearby world succumbing, except in being caught in
suspension, to this earth's gravitation, and surface-materials falling
from that part--
Explain or express or accept, and what does it matter? Our attitude is:
Here are the data.
See for yourself.
What does it matter what my notions may be?
Here are the data.
But think for yourself, or think for myself, all mixed up we must be. A
long time must go by before we can know Florida from Long Island. So
we've had data of fishes that have fallen from our now established and
respectabilized Super-Sargasso Sea--which we've almost forgotten, it's
now so respectable--but we shall have data of fishes that have fallen
during earthquakes. These we accept were dragged down from ponds or
other worlds that have been quaked, when only a few miles away, by this
earth, some other world also quaking this earth.
In a way, or in its principle, our subject is orthodox enough. Only
grant proximity of other worlds--which, however, will not be a matter of
granting, but will be a matter of data--and one conventionally conceives
of their surfaces quaked--even of a whole lake full of fishes being
quaked and dragged down from one of them. The lake full of fishes may
cause a little pain to some minds, but the fall of sand and stones is
pleasantly enough thought of. More scientific persons, or more faithful
hypnotics than we, have taken up this subject, unpainfully, relatively
to the moon. For instance, Perrey has gone over 15,000 records of
earthquakes, and he has correlated many with proximities of the moon, or
has attributed many to the pull of the moon when nearest this earth.
Also there is a paper upon this subject in the _Proc. Roy. Soc. of
Cornwall_, 1845. Or, theoretically, when at its closest to this earth,
the moon quakes the face of this earth, and is itself quaked--but does
not itself fall to this earth. As to showers of matter that may have
come from the moon at such times--one can go over old records and find
what one pleases.
That is what we now shall do.
Our expressions are for acceptance only.
Our data:
We take them from four classes of phenomena that have preceded or
accompanied earthquakes:
Unusual clouds, darkness profound, luminous appearances in the sky, and
falls of substances and objects whether commonly called meteoritic or
not.
Not one of these occurrences fits in with principles of primitive, or
primary, seismology, and every one of them is a datum of a quaked body
passing close to this earth or suspended over it. To the primitives
there is not a reason in the world why a convulsion of this earth's
surface should be accompanied by unusual sights in the sky, by darkness,
or by the fall of substances or objects from the sky. As to phenomena
like these, or storms, preceding earthquakes, the irreconcilability is
still greater.
It was before 1860 that Perrey made his great compilation. We take most
of our data from lists compiled long ago. Only the safe and unpainful
have been published in recent years--at least in ambitious, voluminous
form. The restraining hand of the "System"--as we call it, whether it
has any real existence or not--is tight upon the sciences of today. The
uncanniest aspect of our quasi-existence that I know of is that
everything that seems to have one identity has also as high a seeming of
everything else. In this oneness of allness, or continuity, the
protecting hand strangles; the parental stifles; love is inseparable
from phenomena of hate. There is only Continuity--that is in
quasi-existence. _Nature_, at least in its correspondents' columns,
still evades this protective strangulation, and the _Monthly Weather
Review_ is still a rich field of unfaithful observation: but, in looking
over other long-established periodicals, I have noted their glimmers of
quasi-individuality fade gradually, after about 1860, and the surrender
of their attempted identities to a higher attempted organization. Some
of them, expressing Intermediateness-wide endeavor to localize the
universal, or to localize self, soul, identity, entity--or positiveness
or realness--held out until as far as 1880; traces findable up to
1890--and then, expressing the universal process--except that here and
there in the world's history there may have been successful
approximations to positiveness by "individuals"--who only then became
individuals and attained to selves or souls of their own--surrendered,
submitted, became parts of a higher organization's attempt to
individualize or systematize into a complete thing, or to localize the
universal or the attributes of the universal. After the death of Richard
Proctor, whose occasional illiberalities I'd not like to emphasize too
much, all succeeding volumes of _Knowledge_ have yielded scarcely an
unconventionality. Note the great number of times that the _American
Journal of Science_ and the _Report of the British Association_ are
quoted: note that, after, say, 1885, they're scarcely mentioned in these
inspired but illicit pages--as by hypnosis and inertia, we keep on
saying.
About 1880.
Throttle and disregard.
But the coercion could not be positive, and many of the excommunicated
continued to creep in; or, even to this day, some of the strangled are
faintly breathing.
Some of our data have been hard to find. We could tell stories of great
labor and fruitless quests that would, though perhaps imperceptibly,
stir the sympathy of a Mr. Symons. But, in this matter of concurrence of
earthquakes with aerial phenomena, which are as unassociable with
earthquakes, if internally caused, as falls of sand on convulsed small
boys full of sour apples, the abundance of so-called evidence is so
great that we can only sketchily go over the data, beginning with Robert
Mallet's Catalogue (_Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1852), omitting some
extraordinary instances, because they occurred before the eighteenth
century:
Earthquake "preceded" by a violent tempest, England, Jan. 8,
1704--"preceded" by a brilliant meteor, Switzerland, Nov. 4,
1704--"luminous cloud, moving at high velocity, disappearing behind the
horizon," Florence, Dec. 9, 1731--"thick mists in the air, through which
a dim light was seen: several weeks before the shock, globes of light
had been seen in the air," Swabia, May 22, 1732--rain of earth,
Carpentras, France, Oct. 18, 1737--a black cloud, London, March 19,
1750--violent storm and a strange star of octagonal shape, Slavange,
Norway, April 15, 1752--balls of fire from a streak in the sky,
Augermannland, 1752--numerous meteorites, Lisbon, Oct. 15,
1755--"terrible tempests" over and over--"falls of hail" and "brilliant
meteors," instance after instance--"an immense globe," Switzerland, Nov.
2, 1761--oblong, sulphurous cloud, Germany, April, 1767--extraordinary
mass of vapor, Boulogne, April, 1780--heavens obscured by a dark mist,
Grenada, Aug. 7, 1804--"strange, howling noises in the air, and large
spots obscuring the sun," Palermo, Italy, April 16, 1817--"luminous
meteor moving in the same direction as the shock," Naples, Nov. 22,
1821--fire ball appearing in the sky: apparent size of the moon,
Thuringerwald, Nov. 29, 1831.
And, unless you be polarized by the New Dominant, which is calling for
recognition of multiplicities of external things, as a Dominant, dawning
new over Europe in 1492, called for recognition of terrestrial
externality to Europe--unless you have this contact with the new, you
have no affinity for these data--beans that drop from a
magnet--irreconcilables that glide from the mind of a Thomson--
Or my own acceptance that we do not really think at all; that we
correlate around super-magnets that I call Dominants--a Spiritual
Dominant in one age, and responsively to it up spring monasteries, and
the stake and the cross are its symbols: a Materialist Dominant, and up
spring laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are
its ikons--that we're nothing but iron filings relatively to a
succession of magnets that displace preceding magnets.
With no soul of your own, and with no soul of my own--except that some
day some of us may no longer be Intermediatisms, but may hold out
against the cosmos that once upon a time thousands of fishes were cast
from one pail of water--we have psycho-valency for these data, if we're
obedient slaves to the New Dominant, and repulsion to them, if we're
mere correlates to the Old Dominant. I'm a soulless and selfless
correlate to the New Dominant, myself: I see what I have to see. The
only inducement I can hold out, in my attempt to rake up disciples, is
that some day the New will be fashionable: the new correlates will sneer
at the old correlates. After all, there is some inducement to that--and
I'm not altogether sure it's desirable to end up as a fixed star.
As a correlate to the New Dominant, I am very much impressed with some
of these data--the luminous object that moved in the same direction as
an earthquake--it seems very acceptable that a quake followed this thing
as it passed near this earth's surface. The streak that was seen in the
sky--or only a streak that was visible of another world--and objects, or
meteorites, that were shaken down from it. The quake at Carpentras,
France: and that, above Carpentras, was a smaller world, more violently
quaked, so that earth was shaken down from it.
But I like best the super-wolves that were seen to cross the sun during
the earthquake at Palermo.
They howled.
Or the loves of the worlds. The call they feel for one another. They try
to move closer and howl when they get there.
The howls of the planets.