Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/206

200 that there is very little to it. A dark object that was seen by Prof. Heis, for eleven degrees of arc, moving slowly across the Milky Way. (Greg's Catalogue, Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1867-426.)

One of our quasi-reasons for accepting that orbitless worlds are dirigible is the almost complete absence of data of collisions: of course, though in defiance of gravitation, they may, without direction like human direction, adjust to one another in the way of vortex rings of smoke—a very human-like way that is. But in Knowledge, Feb., 1894, are two photographs of Brooks' comet that are shown as evidence of its seeming collision with a dark object, Oct., 1893. Our own wording is that it "struck against something": Prof. Barnard's is that it had "entered some dense medium, which shattered it." For all I know it had knocked against merely a field of ice.

Melanicus.

That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip—a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful.

He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black, brooding vampire.

Science, July 31, 1896:

That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W. R. Brooks, director of the Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object pass rather slowly across the moon, in a horizontal direction. In Mr. Brooks' opinion it was a dark meteor. In Science, Sept. 14, 1896, a correspondent writes that, in his opinion, it may have been a bird. We shall have no trouble with the meteor and bird mergers, if we have observations of long duration and estimates of size up to hundreds of miles. As to the body that was seen by Brooks, there is a note from the Dutch astronomer, Muller, in the Scientific American, 75-251, that, upon April 4, 1892, he had seen a similar phenomenon. In Science Gossip, n. s., 3-135, are more details of the Brooks object—apparent diameter about one-thirtieth of the moon's—moon's disk crossed in three or four seconds. The writer, in Science Gossip, says that, on June 27, 1896, at one o'clock in the morning, he was looking at the moon with a 2-inch achromatic, power 44, when a long black object sailed past, from west to east, the transit occupying 3 or 4 seconds. He believed this object to be a bird—there was, however, no fluttering motion observable in it.