The Book of the Damned | Page 7

upon his theory of cosmic dust, and Prof. Cleveland Abbe contended against the Krakatoan explanation--but that this is the orthodoxy of the main body of scientists.
My own chief reason for indignation here:
That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities.
It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power.
Later, we shall have data of things that have gone up in the air and that have stayed up--somewhere--weeks--months--but not by the sustaining power of the earth's atmosphere. For instance, the turtle of Vicksburg. It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think of a good-sized turtle hanging, for three or four months, upheld only by the air, over the town of Vicksburg. When it comes to the horse and the barn--I think that they'll be classics some day, but I can never accept that a horse and a barn could float several months in this earth's atmosphere.
The orthodox explanation:
See the Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society. It comes out absolutely for the orthodox explanation--absolutely and beautifully, also expensively. There are 492 pages in the "Report," and 40 plates, some of them marvellously colored. It was issued after an investigation that took five years. You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and persistences --
Annual Register, 1883-105:
That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred;
Knowledge, 5-418:
That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption.
* * *
Inertia and its inhospitality.
Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
We shall have a few data initiatorily.
I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities.
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
Hailstones, for instance. One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the size of hens' eggs. One smiles. Nevertheless I will engage to list one hundred instances, from the Monthly Weather Review, of hailstones the size of hens' eggs. There is an account in Nature, Nov. 1, 1894, of hailstones that weighed almost two pounds each. See Chambers' Encyclopedia for three-pounders. Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1870-479--two-pounders authenticated, and six-pounders reported. At Seringapatam, India, about the year 1800, fell a hailstone --
I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned. I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages--but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.
We laugh.
Or snowflakes. Size of saucers. Said to have fallen at Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 24, 1891. One smiles.
"In Montana, in the winter of 1887, fell snowflakes 15 inches across, and 8 inches thick." (Monthly Weather Review, 1915-73.)
In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.
* * *
Black rains--red rains--the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
Jet-black snow--pink snow--blue hailstones--hailstones flavored like oranges.
Punk and silk and charcoal.
* * *
About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:
In the first place there are no stones in the sky:
Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.
Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.
In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness, in its aspect of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.
The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen: that it had been struck by lightning.
So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.
But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them --
Monthly Review, 1796-426:
"The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem