Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/178

172 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 hail-stones 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