The Book of the Damned (11 page)

Reassurance rises again:

Prof. Baden-Powell says: “It contains also charcoal, which might perhaps be acquired from matter among which it fell.”

This is a common reflex with the exclusionists: that substances not “truly meteoritic” did not fall from the sky, but were picked up by “truly meteoritic” things, of course only on their surfaces, by impact with this earth.

Rhythm of reassurances and their declines:

According to Dr. Smith, this substance was not merely coated with charcoal; his analysis gives 43.59 percent carbon.

Our acceptance that coal has fallen from the sky will be via data of resinous substances and bituminous substances, which merge so that they cannot be told apart.

Resinous substance said to have fallen at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1887
(Rept. Brit. Assoc.,
1860-94).

A resinous substance that fell after a fireball? at Neuhaus, Bohemia, Dec. 17, 1824
(Rept. Brit. Assoc.,
1860-70).

Fall, July 28, 1885, at Luchon, during a storm, of a brownish substance; very friable, carbonaceous matter; when burned it gave out a resinous odor
(Comptes Rendus,
103-837).

Substance that fell, Feb. 17, 18, 19, 1841, at Genoa, Italy, said to have been resinous; said by Arago
(Œuvres,
12-469) to have been bituminous matter and sand.

Fall—during a thunderstorm—July, 1681, near Cape Cod, upon the deck of an English vessel, the
Albemarle,
of “burning, bituminous matter”
(Edin. New Phil. Jour.,
26-86); a fall, at Christiania, Norway, June 13, 1822, of bituminous matter, listed by Greg as doubtful; fall of bituminous matter, in Germany, March 8, 1798, listed by Greg. Lockyer
(The Meteoric Hypothesis,
p. 24) says that the substance that fell at the Cape of Good Hope, Oct. 13, 1838—about five cubic feet of it: substance so soft that it was cutable with a knife—“after being experimented upon, it left a residue, which gave out a very bituminous smell.”

And this inclusion of Lockyer’s—so far as findable in all books that I have read—is, in books, about as close as we can get to our desideratum—that coal has fallen from the sky. Dr. Farrington, except with a brief mention, ignores the whole subject of the fall of carbonaceous matter from the sky. Proctor, in all of his books that I have read—is, in books, about as close as we can get to the admission that carbonaceous matter has been found in meteorites “in very minute quantities”—or my own suspicion is that it is possible to damn something else only by losing one’s own soul—quasi-soul, of course.

Sci. Amer.,
35-120:

That the substance that fell at the Cape of Good Hope “resembled a piece of anthracite coal more than anything else.”

It’s a mistake, I think: the resemblance is to bituminous coal—but it is from the periodicals that we must get our data. To the writers of books upon meteorites, it would be as wicked—by which we mean departure from the characters of an established species—quasi-established, of course—to say that coal has fallen from the sky, as would be, to something in a barnyard, a temptation that it climb a tree and catch a bird. Domestic things in a barnyard: and how wild things from forests outside seem to them. Or the homeopathist—but we shall shovel data of coal.

And, if over and over, we shall learn of masses of soft coal that have fallen upon this earth, if in no instance has it been asserted that the masses did not fall, but were upon the ground in the first place; if we have many instances, this time we turn down good and hard the mechanical reflex that these masses were carried from one place to another in whirlwinds, because we find it too difficult to accept that whirlwinds could so select, or so specialize in a peculiar substance. Among writers of books, the only one I know of who makes more than brief mention is Sir Robert Ball. He represents a still more antique orthodoxy, or is an exclusionist of the old type, still holding out against even meteorites. He cites several falls of carbonaceous matter, but with disregards that make for reasonableness that earthy matter may have been caught up by whirlwinds and flung down somewhere else. If he had given a full list, he would be called upon to explain the special affinity of whirlwinds for a special kind of coal. He does not give a full list. We shall have all that’s findable, and we shall see that against this disease we’re writing, the homeopathist’s prescription availeth not. Another exclusionist was Prof. Lawrence Smith. His psycho-tropism was to respond to all reports of carbonaceous matter falling from the sky, by saying that this damned matter had been deposited upon things of the chosen by impact with this earth. Most of our data antedate him, or were contemporaneous with him, or were as accessible to him as to us. In his attempted positivism it is simply—and beautifully—disregarded that, according to Berthelot, Berzelius, Cloez, Wohler and others these masses are not merely coated with carbonaceous matter, but are carbonaceous throughout, or are permeated throughout. How anyone could so resolutely and dogmatically and beautifully and blindly hold out would puzzle us were it not for our acceptance that only to think is to exclude and include; and to exclude some things that have as much right to come in as have the included—that to have an opinion upon any subject is to be a Lawrence Smith—because there is no definite subject.

Dr. Walter Flight
(Eclectic Magazine,
89-71) says, of the substance that fell near Alais, France, March 15, 1806, that it “emits a faint bituminous substance” when heated, according to the observations of Berzelius and a commission appointed by the French Academy. This time we have not the reluctances expressed in such words as “like” and “resembling.” We are told that this substance is “an earthy kind of coal.”

As to “minute quantities” we are told that the substance that fell at the Cape of Good Hope has in it a little more than a quarter of organic matter, which, in alcohol, gives the familiar reaction of yellow, resinous matter. Other instances given by Dr. Flight are:

Carbonaceous matter that fell in 1840, in Tennessee; Cranbourne, Australia, 1861; Montauban, France, May 14, 1864 (twenty masses, some of them as large as a human head, of a substance that “resembled a dull-colored earthy lignite”); Goalpara, India, about 1867 (about eight percent of a hydrocarbon); at Ornans, France, July 11, 1868; substance with “an organic, combustible ingredient,” at Hessle, Sweden, Jan. 1, 1860.

Knowledge,
4-134:

That, according to M. Daubrée, the substance that had fallen in the Argentine Republic, “resembled certain kinds of lignite and boghead coal.” In
Comptes Rendus,
96-1764, it is said that this mass fell, June 30, 1880, in the province Entre Ríos, Argentina: that it is “like” brown coal; that it resembles all the other carbonaceous masses that have fallen from the sky.

Something that fell at Grazac, France, Aug. 10, 1885: when burned, it gave out a bituminous odor
(Comptes Rendus,
104-1771).

Carbonaceous substance that fell at Rajpunta, India, Jan. 22, 1911: very friable: fifty percent of its soluble in water
(Records Geol. Survey of India,
44-pt. 1-41).

A combustible carbonaceous substance that fell with sand at Naples, March 14, 1818
(Amer. Jour. Sci.,
1-1-309).

Sci. Amer. Sup.,
29-11798:

That, June 9, 1889, a very friable substance, of a deep, greenish black, fell at Mighei, Russia. It contained five percent organic matter, which, when powdered and digested in alcohol, yielded, after evaporation, a bright yellow resin. In this mass was two percent of an unknown mineral.

Cinders and ashes and slag and coke and charcoal and coal.

And the things that sometimes deep-sea fishes are bumped by.

Reluctances and the disguises or covered retreats of such words as “like” and “resemble”—or that conditions of Intermediateness forbid abrupt transitions—but that the spirit animating all Intermediateness is to achieve abrupt transitions—because, if anything could finally break away from its origin and environment, that would be a real thing—something not merging away indistinguishably with the surrounding. So all attempt to be original; all attempt to invent something that is more than mere extension or modification of the preceding, is positivism—or that if one could conceive of a device to catch flies, positively different from, or unrelated to, all other devices—up he’d shoot to heaven, or the Positive Absolute—leaving behind such an incandescent train that in one age it would be said that he had gone aloft in a fiery chariot, and in another age that he had been struck by lightning—

I’m collecting notes upon persons supposed to have been struck by lightning. I think that high approximation to positivism has often been achieved—instantaneous translation—residue of negativeness left behind, looking much like effects of a stroke of lightning. Someday I shall tell the story of the
Marie Celeste—“prop
erly,” as the
Scientific American Supplement
would say—mysterious disappearance of a sea captain, his family, and the crew—

Of positivists, by the route of Abrupt Transition, I think that Manet was notable—but that his approximation was held down by his intense relativity to the public—or that it is quite as impositive to flout and insult and defy as it is to crawl and placate. Of course, Manet began with continuity with Courbet and others, and then, between him and Manet there were mutual influences—but the spirit of abrupt difference is the spirit of positivism, and Manet’s stand was against the dictum that all lights and shades must merge away suavely into one another and prepare for one another. So a biologist like De Vries represents positivism, or the breaking of Continuity, by trying to conceive of evolution by mutation—against the dogma of indistinguishable gradations by “minute variations.” A Copernicus conceives of heliocentricity. Continuity is against him. He is not permitted to break abruptly with the past. He is permitted to publish his work, but only as “an interesting hypothesis.”

Continuity—and that all that we call evolution or progress is attempt to break away from it—

That our whole solar system was at one time attempt by planets to break away from a parental nexus and set up as individualities, and, failing, move in quasi-regular orbits that are expressions of relations with the sun and with one another, all having surrendered, being now quasi-incorporated in a higher approximation to system;

Intermediateness in its mineralogic aspect of positivism—or Iron that strove to break away from Sulphur and Oxygen, and be real, homogeneous Iron—failing, inasmuch as elemental iron exists only in textbook chemistry;

Intermediateness in its biologic aspect of positivism—or the wild, fantastic, grotesque, monstrous things it conceived of, sometimes in a frenzy of effort to break away abruptly from all preceding types—but failing, in the giraffe-effort, for instance, or only caricaturing an antelope—

All things break one relation only by the establishing of some other relation—

All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast.

So the fight of the exclusionists to maintain the traditional—or to prevent abrupt transition from the quasi-established—fighting so that here, more than a century after meteorites were included, no other notable inclusion has been made, except that of cosmic dust, data of which Nordenskjold made more nearly real than data in opposition.

So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the preposterous, against Sir W.H. Thomson’s notions of arrival upon this earth of organisms on meteorites—

“I can only regard it as a jest,”
(Knowledge,
1-302).

Or that there is nothing but jest—or something intermediate to jest and tragedy;

That ours is not an existence but an utterance;

That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive—like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist—

That Momus is imagining us and our arts and sciences and religions, and is narrating or picturing us as a satire upon the gods’ real existence.

Because—with many of our data of coal that has fallen from the sky as accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific pronouncement that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, by which we mean a consistent existence, or a state in which there is real intelligence, or a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably merge away with imbecility, could there have been such a row as that which was raised about forty years ago over Dr. Hahn’s announcement that he had found fossils in meteorites?

Accessible to anybody at that time:

Philosophical Magazine,
4-17-425:

That the substance that fell at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1857, contained organic matter “analogous to fossil waxes.”

Or limestone:

Of the block of limestone which was reported to have fallen at Middleburg, Florida, it is said
(Science,
11-118) that, though something had been seen to fall in “an old cultivated field,” the witnesses who ran to it picked up something that “had been upon the ground in the first place.” The writer who tells us this, with the usual exclusion-imagination known as stupidity, but unjustly, because there is no real stupidity, thinks he can think of a good-sized stone that had for many years been in a cultivated field, but that had never been seen before—had never interfered with plowing, for instance. He is earnest and unjarred when he writes that this stone weighs 200 pounds. My own notion, founded upon my own experience in seeing, is that a block of stone weighing 500 pounds might be in one’s parlor twenty years, virtually unseen—but not in an old cultivated field, where it interfered with plowing—not anywhere—if it interfered.

Dr. Hahn said that he had found fossils in meteorites. There is a description of the corals, sponges, shells, and crinoids, all of them microscopic, which he photographed, in
Popular Science,
20-83.

Dr. Hahn was a well-known scientist. He was better known after that.

Anybody may theorize upon other worlds and conditions upon them that are similar to our own conditions: if his notions be presented undisguisedly as fiction, or only as an “interesting hypothesis,” he’ll stir up no prude rages.