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BOOK OF THE DAMNED
By Charles Fort
CHAPTER: 01,
02, 03,
04, 05,
06, 07,
08, 09,
10, 11,
12, 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23,
24, 25,
26, 27,
28
ONE of the most extraordinary phenomena, or alleged phenomena,
of psychic research, or alleged research -- if in quasi-existence there never has
been real research, but only approximations to research that merge away, or that
are continuous with, prejudice and convenience--
"Stone-throwing."
It's attributed to poltergeists. They're mischievous spirits.
Poltergeists do not assimilate with our own present
quasi-system, which is an attempt to correlate denied or disregarded data as
phenomena of extra-telluric forces, expressed in physical terms. Therefore I
regard poltergeists as evil or false or discordant or absurd -- names that we give
to various degrees or aspects of the unassimilable, or that which resists
attempts to organize, harmonize, systematize, or, in short, to positivize --
names
that we give to our recognition of the negative state. I don't care to deny
poltergeists, because I suspect that later, when we're more enlightened, or when
we widen the range of our credulities, or take on more of that increase of
ignorance that is called knowledge, poltergeists may become assimilable. Then
they'll be as reasonable as trees. By reasonableness I mean that which
assimilates with a dominant force, or system, or a major body of thought --
which
is, itself, of course, hypnosis and delusion -- developing, however, in our
acceptance, to higher and higher approximations to realness. The poltergeists
are now evil or absurd to me, proportionately to their present unassimilableness,
compounded, however, with the factor of their possible future assimilableness.
We lug in the poltergeists, because some of our own data, or
alleged data, merge away indistinguishably with data, or alleged data, of them:
Instances of stones that have been thrown, or that have
fallen, upon a small area, from an unseen and undetectable source.
London Times, April 27, 1872:
"From 4 o'clock, Thursday afternoon until half-past
eleven, Thursday night, the houses, 56 and 58 Reverdy Road, Bermondsey, were
assailed with stones and other missiles coming from an unseen quarter. Two
children were injured, every window was broken, and several articles of
furniture were destroyed. Although there was a strong body of policemen
scattered in the neighbourhood, they could not trace the direction whence the
stones were thrown."
"Other missiles" make a complication here. But if
the expression means tin cans and old shoes, and if we accept that the direction
could not be traced because it never occurred to anyone to look upward -- why
we've lost a good deal of our provincialism by this time.
London Times, Sept. 16, 1841:
That, in the home of Mrs. Charton, at Sutton Courthouse,
Sutton Lane, Chiswick, windows had been broken "by some unseen agent."
Every attempt to detect the perpetrator failed. The mansion was detached and
surrounded by high walls. No other building was near it.
The police were called. Two constables, assisted by members of
the household, guarded the house, but the windows continued to be broken
"both in front and behind the house."
Or the floating islands that are often stationary in the
Super-Sargasso Sea; and atmospheric disturbances that sometimes affect them, and
bring things down within small areas, upon this earth, from temporarily
stationary sources.
Super-Sargasso Sea and the beaches of its floating islands
from which I think, or at least accept, pebbles have fallen:
Wolverhampton, England, June, 1860 -- violent storm --
fall of so
many little black pebbles that they were cleared away by shoveling (La Sci.
Pour Tous, 5-264); great number of small black stones that fell at
Birmingham, England, Aug., 1858 -- violent storm -- said to be similar to some
basalt a few leagues from Birmingham (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1864-37);
pebbles described as "common water-worn pebbles" that fell at
Palestine, Texas, July 6, 1888 -- "of a formation not found near
Palestine" (W. H. Perry, Sergeant, Signal Corps), Monthly Weather
Review, July, 1888); round, smooth pebbles at Kandahor, 1834 (Am. J.
Sci., 1-26-161); "a number of stones of peculiar formation and shapes,
uncommon in this neighborhood fell in a tornado at Hillsboro, Ill., May 18,
1883." (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1883.)
Pebbles from aerial beaches and terrestrial pebbles as
products of whirlwinds, so merge in these instances that, though it's
interesting to hear of things of peculiar shape that have fallen from the sky,
it seems best to pay little attention here, and to find phenomena of the
Super-Sargasso Sea remote from the merger:
To this requirement we have three adaptations:
Pebbles that fell where no whirlwind to which to attribute
them could be learned of;
Pebbles which fell in hail so large that incredibly could that
hail have been formed in this earth's atmosphere;
Pebbles which fell and were, long afterward, followed by more
pebbles, as if from some aerial, stationary source, in the same place.
In September, 1898, there was a story in a New York newspaper,
of lightning -- or an appearance of luminosity? -- in Jamaica -- something had struck
a tree: near the tree were found some small pebbles. It was said that the
pebbles had fallen from the sky, with the lightning. But the insult to orthodoxy
was that they were not angular fragments such as might have been broken from a
stony meteorite: that they were "water-worn pebbles."
In the geographical vagueness of a mainland, the explanation
"up from one place and down in another" is always good, and is never
overworked, until the instances are massed as they are in this book: but, upon
this occasion, in the relatively small area of Jamaica, there was no whirlwind
findable -- however "there in the first place" bobs up.
Monthly Weather Review, Aug.,
1898-363:
That the government meteorologist had investigated: had
reported that a tree had been struck by lightning, and that small water-worn
pebbles had been found near the tree: but that similar pebbles could be found
all over Jamaica.
Monthly Weather Review, Sept.,
1915-446:
Prof. Fassig gives an account of a fall of hail that occurred
in Maryland, June 22, 1915: hailstones the size of baseballs "not at all
uncommon."
"An interesting, but unconfirmed, account stated that
small pebbles were found at the center of some of the larger hail gathered at
Annapolis. The young man who related the story offered to produce the pebbles,
but has not done so."
A footnote:
"Since writing this, the author states he has received
some of the pebbles."
When a young man "produces" pebbles, that's as
convincing as anything else I've ever heard of, though no more convincing than,
if having told of ham sandwiches falling from the sky, he should
"produce" ham sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted
by us, we correlate it with a datum reported by a Weather Bureau observer,
signifying that, whether the pebbles had been somewhere aloft a long time or
not, some of the hailstones that fell with them, had been. The datum is that
some of these hailstones were composed of from twenty to twenty-five layers
alternately of clear ice and snow-ice. In orthodox terms I argue that a
fair-sized hailstone falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to warm it
so that it would not take on even one layer of ice. To put twenty layers of ice,
I conceive of something that had not fallen at all, but had rolled somewhere, at
a leisurely rate, for a long time.
We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two
respects:
Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Sterlitamak,
Orenburg, Russia, Sept., 1824 (Phil. Mag., 4-8-463).
A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25,
1825 (Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 1828-1-447).
I now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first I came upon
these data I was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects of Orenburg
were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of iron. I had no notion of
metallic objects that might have been shaped or molded by means other than
crystallization, until I came to Arago's account of these occurrences (Oeuvres,
11-644). Here the analysis gives 70 per cent red oxide of iron, and sulphur and
loss by ignition 5 per cent. It seems to me acceptable that iron with
considerably less than 5 per cent. sulphur in it is not iron pyrites -- then
little, rusty iron objects, shaped by some other means, have fallen, four months
apart, at the same place. M. Arago expresses astonishment at this phenomenon of
recurrence so familiar to us.
Altogether, I find opening before us, vistas of heresies to
which I, for one, must shut my eyes. I have always been in sympathy with the
dogmatists and exclusionists: that is plain in our opening lines: that to seem
to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude. It is only that
exclusionists who are good in the nineteenth century are evil in the twentieth
century. Constantly we feel a merging away into infinitude; but that this book
shall approximate to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization,
or that we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back
constantly from wandering off into infinitude. The thing that we do, however, is
to make our own outline, or the difference between what we include and what we
exclude, vague.
The crux here, and the limit beyond which we may not go
-- very much -- is:
Acceptance that there is a region that we call the
Super-Sargasso Sea -- not yet fully accepted, but a provisional position that has
received a great deal of support--
But is it a part of this earth, and does it revolve with and
over this earth--
Or does it flatly overlie this earth, not revolving with and
over this earth--
That this earth does not revolve, and is not round, or
roundish, at all, but is continuous with the rest of its system, so that, if one
could break away from the traditions of the geographers, one might walk and
walk, and come to Mars, and then find Mars continuous with Jupiter?
I suppose some day such queries will sound absurd -- the thing
will be so obvious--
Because it is very difficult for me to conceive of little
metallic objects hanging precisely over a small town in Russia, for four months,
if revolving, unattached, with a revolving earth--
It may be that something aimed at that town, and then later
took another shot.
These are speculations that seem to me to be evil relatively
to these early years in the twentieth century--
Just now, I accept that this earth is -- not round, of course:
that is very old-fashioned -- but roundish, or, at least, that it has what is
called form of its own, and does revolve upon its axis, and in an orbit around
the sun. I only accept these old traditional notions--
And that above it are regions of suspension that revolve with
it: from which objects fall, by disturbances of various kinds, and then, later,
fall again, in the same place:
Monthly Weather Review, May,
1884-134:
Report from the Signal Service observer, at Bismarck, Dakota:
That, at 9 o'clock, in the evening of May 22, 1884, sharp
sounds were heard throughout the city, caused by the fall of flinty stones
striking against windows.
Fifteen hours later another fall of flinty stones occurred at
Bismarck.
There is no report of stones having fallen anywhere else.
This is a thing of the ultra-damned. All Editors of scientific
publications read the Monthly Weather Review and frequently copy from
it. The noise made by the stones of Bismarck, rattling against those windows,
may be in a language that aviators will some day interpret: but it was a noise
entirely surrounded by silences. Of this ultra-damned thing, there is no
mention, findable by me, in any other publication.
The size of some hailstones has worried many
meteorologists -- but not text-book meteorologists. I know of no more serene
occupation than that of writing text-books -- though writing for the War Cry,
of the Salvation Army, may be equally unadventurous. In the drowsy tranquillity
of a text-book, we easily and unintelligently read of dust particles around
which icy rain forms, hailstones, in their fall, then increasing by accretion --
but in the meteorological journals, we read often of air-spaces
nucleating hailstones--
But it's the size of the things. Dip a marble in icy water.
Dip and dip and dip it. If you're a resolute dipper, you will, after a while,
have an object the size of a baseball -- but I think a thing could fall from the
moon in that length of time. Also the strata of them. The Maryland hailstones
are unusual, but a dozen strata have often been counted. Ferrel gives an
instance of thirteen strata. Such considerations led Prof. Schwedoff to argue
that some hailstones are not, and can not, be generated in this earth's
atmosphere -- that they come from somewhere else. Now, in a relative existence,
nothing can of itself be either attractive or repulsive: its effects are
functions of its associations or implications. Many of our data have been taken
from very conservative scientific sources: it was not until their discordant
implications, or irreconcilabilities with the System, were perceived, that
excommunication was pronounced against them.
Prof. Schwedoff's paper was read before the British
Association (Rept. of 1882, p. 453).
The implication, and the repulsiveness of the implication to
the snug and tight little exclusionists of 1882 -- though we hold out that they
were functioning well and ably relatively to 1882--
That there is water -- oceans or lakes and ponds, or rivers of
it -- that there is water away from, and yet not far-remote from, this earth's
atmosphere and gravitation--
The pain of it:
That the snug little system of 1882 would be ousted from its
reposefulness--
A whole new science to learn:
The Science of Super-Geography--
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 the 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
naïve 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 débris, 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 these "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 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 Athenum, 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 near Birmingham, 26 days later, June 8, 1811 (Thomson,
"Intro. to Meteorology," p. 129); size of pumpkins, Bungalore, 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, Mason, 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); lump 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 fell at Cazorta,
Spain, June 15, 1829; block of ice, weighing eleven pounds, at Cette, France,
Oct., 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, Aug.,
1882. We are told that Mr. W. J. Hagler, the North Sante Fé 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, Aug., 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 archæologic and paleontologic
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 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, 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 to twenty miles away from this earth, and [178/179] 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 they are. 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 the 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 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 the 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, Feb., 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 by 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 ice is heavier -- that is, in masses. That
notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at the
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 9, 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 had been cut into section 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 the earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the
sun's rays had had time for their effects:
Monthly Weather Review, Oct., 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 centre at these two trees, and when lightest occurs
there only."
CHAPTER: 01,
02, 03,
04, 05,
06, 07,
08, 09,
10, 11,
12, 13,
14, 15,
16, 17,
18, 19,
20, 21,
22, 23,
24, 25,
26, 27,
28
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