Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/179

Rh And Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things.

So the members of the British Association. To some of them Prof. Schwedoff's ideas were like slaps on the back of an environment-denying turtle: to some of them his heresy was like an offering of meat, raw and dripping, to milk-fed lambs. Some of them bleated like lambs, and some of them turled like turtles. We used to crucify, but now we ridicule: or, in the loss of vigor of all progress, the spike has etherealized into the laugh.

Sir William Thomson ridiculed the heresy, with the phantomosities of his era:

That all bodies, such as hailstones, if away from this earth's atmosphere, would have to move at planetary velocity—which would be positively reasonable if the pronouncements of St. Isaac were anything but articles of faith—that a hailstone falling through this earth's atmosphere, with planetary velocity, would perform 13,000 times as much work as would raise an equal weight of water one degree centigrade, and therefore never fall as a hailstone at all; be more than melted—super-volatalized

These turls and these bleats of pedantry—though we insist that, relatively to 1882, these turls and bleats should be regarded as respectfully as we regard rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless—it is the survival of rag dolls into maturity that we object to—so these pious and naïve ones who believed that 13,000 times something could have—that is, in quasi-existence—an exact and calculable resultant, whereas there is—in quasi-existence—nothing that can, except by delusion and convenience, be called a unit, in the first place—whose devotions to St. Isaac required blind belief in formulas of falling bodies

Against data that were piling up, in their own time, of slow-falling meteorites; "milk warm" ones admitted even by Farrington and Merrill; at least one icy meteorite nowhere denied by the present orthodoxy, a datum as accessible to Thomson, in 1882, as it is now to us, because it was an occurrence of 1860. Beans and needles and tacks and a magnet. Needles and tacks adhere to and systematize relatively to a magnet, but, if some beans, too, be caught up, they are irreconcilables to this system and drop right out of it. A member of the Salvation Army may hear over and over data that seem so memorable to an evolutionist. It seems remarkable that they do not influence him—one finds that he can not remember them. It is incredible that Sir William Thomson had never heard of slow-falling,