Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/227

Rh That, according to the La Crosse Daily Republican, of March 20, 1886, darkness suddenly settled upon the city of Oshkosh, Wis., at 3 p. m., March 19. In five minutes the darkness equaled that of midnight.

Consternation.

I think that some of us are likely to overdo our own superiority and the absurd fears of the Middle Ages

Oshkosh.

People in the streets rushing in all directions—horses running away—women and children running into cellars—little modern touch after all: gas meters instead of images and relics of saints.

This darkness, which lasted from eight to ten minutes, occurred in a day that had been "light but cloudy." It passed from west to east, and brightness followed: then came reports from towns to the west of Oshkosh: that the same phenomenon had already occurred there. A "wave of total darkness" had passed from west to east.

Other instances are recorded in the Monthly Weather Review, but, as to all of them, we have a sense of being pretty well-eclipsed, ourselves, by the conventional explanation that the obscuring body was only a very dense mass of clouds. But some of the instances are interesting—intense darkness at Memphis, Tenn., for about fifteen minutes, at 10 a. m., Dec. 2, 1904—"We are told that in some quarters a panic prevailed, and that some were shouting and praying and imagining that the end of the world had come." (M. W. R., 32-522.) At Louisville, Ky., March 7, 1911, at about 8 a. m.: duration about half an hour; had been raining moderately, and then hail had fallen. "The intense blackness and general ominous appearance of the storm spread terror throughout the city." (M. W. R., 39-345.)

However, this merger between possible eclipses by unknown dark bodies and commonplace terrestrial phenomena is formidable.

As to darknesses that have fallen upon vast areas, conventionality is—smoke from forest fires. In the U. S. Forest Service Bulletin, No. 117, F. G. Plummer gives a list of eighteen darknesses that have occurred in the United States and Canada. He is one of the primitives, but I should say that his dogmatism is shaken by vibrations from the new Dominant. His difficulty, which he acknowledges, but which he would have disregarded had he written a decade or so earlier, is the profundity of some of these obscurations. He says that mere smokiness can not account for such "awe-inspiring dark days." So he conceives of eddies in the air, concentrating the