The Book of the Damned Part 16
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. Some day I shall tell the story of the _Marie Celeste_--"properly," 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 helio-centricity. 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, h.o.m.ogeneous Iron--failing, inasmuch as elemental iron exists only in text-book 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 Nordenskiold 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 amus.e.m.e.nt of the G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds' 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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 "a.n.a.lagous 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, sh.e.l.ls, 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.
But Dr. Hahn said definitely that he had found fossils in specified meteorites: also he published photographs of them. His book is in the New York Public Library. In the reproductions every feature of some of the little sh.e.l.ls is plainly marked. If they're not sh.e.l.ls, neither are things under an oyster-counter. The striations are very plain: one sees even the hinges where bivalves are joined.
Prof. Lawrence Smith (_Knowledge_, 1-258):
"Dr. Hahn is a kind of half-insane man, whose imagination has run away with him."
Conservation of Continuity.
Then Dr. Weinland examined Dr. Hahn's specimens. He gave his opinion that they are fossils and that they are not crystals of enstat.i.te, as a.s.serted by Prof. Smith, who had never seen them.
The d.a.m.nation of denial and the d.a.m.nation of disregard:
After the publication of Dr. Weinland's findings--silence.
7
The living things that have come down to this earth:
Attempts to preserve the system:
That small frogs and toads, for instance, never have fallen from the sky, but were--"on the ground, in the first place"; or that there have been such falls--"up from one place in a whirlwind, and down in another."
Were there some especially froggy place near Europe, as there is an especially sandy place, the scientific explanation would of course be that all small frogs falling from the sky in Europe come from that center of frogeity.
To start with, I'd like to emphasize something that I am permitted to see because I am still primitive or intelligent or in a state of maladjustment:
That there is not one report findable of a fall of tadpoles from the sky.
As to "there in the first place":
See _Leisure Hours_, 3-779, for accounts of small frogs, or toads, said to have been seen to fall from the sky. The writer says that all observers were mistaken: that the frogs or toads must have fallen from trees or other places overhead.
Tremendous number of little toads, one or two months old, that were seen to fall from a great thick cloud that appeared suddenly in a sky that had been cloudless, August, 1804, near Toulouse, France, according to a letter from Prof. Pontus to M. Arago. (_Comptes Rendus_, 3-54.)
Many instances of frogs that were seen to fall from the sky. (_Notes and Queries_, 8-6-104); accounts of such falls, signed by witnesses. (_Notes and Queries_, 8-6-190.)
_Scientific American_, July 12, 1873:
"A shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance is the reported result of a recent rainstorm at Kansas City, Mo."
As to having been there "in the first place":
Little frogs found in London, after a heavy storm, July 30, 1838.
(_Notes and Queries_, 8-7-437);
Little toads found in a desert, after a rainfall (_Notes and Queries_, 8-8-493).