New Lands | Page 2

"The Book of the Damned" with "New Lands" pointing incidentally to Mars as "the San Salvador of the Sky," and renewing his passion for the dismayingly significant "damned --" tokens and strange hints excluded by the historically mercurial acceptances of "Dogmatic Science." Of his attack on the astronomers it can at least be said that the literature of indignation is enriched by it.
To the "university-trained mind" here is wildness almost as wild as Roger Bacon's once appeared to be; though of course even the layest of lay brothers must not assume that all wild science will in time become accepted law, as some of Roger's did. Retort to Mr. Fort must be left to the outraged astronomer. If indeed any astronomer could feel himself so little outraged as to offer a retort. Lay brethren are outside the quarrel and must content themselves with gratitude to a man who writes two such books as "New Lands" and "The Book of the Damned"; gratitude for passages and pictures--moving pictures--of such cyclonic activity and dimensions that a whole new area of a reader's imagination stirs in amazement and is brought to life.
BOOTH TARKINGTON.

NEW LANDS PART I CHAPTER ONE
LANDS in the sky--
That they are nearby--
That they do not move.
I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again--
The last quarter of the fifteenth century--land to the west!
This first quarter of the twentieth century--we shall have revelations.
There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times are wider times--so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, can not be, in the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming vacancy--that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital may appear again--
Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments; crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations, intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must, go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear invitation in dimensions. There are many persons, who have not investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth have been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in "Darkest Africa." Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion--
Outlet and invitation and opportunity--
San Salvadors of the Sky--a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens of Servia--a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to the city of Birmingham, England.
Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives, which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to fringe with uniform, decorous icicles--from which there will be no escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents.
But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts, departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible requital of needs are opposed--not by the orthodoxy of the common Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy.
Islands of space--see Sci. Amer., vol. this and p. that--accounts from the Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci.--Nature, etc.--except for an occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be sneered at. As to our interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as suggestions and gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers and oceans of an extra-geography--
Stay and let salvation damn you--or straddle an auroral beam and paddle it from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there are such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well cooked and well served, comfort looked after so carefully--or some day board the thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887, and ride on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost, escaping collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of