Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/37

Rh Black rain in Switzerland, Jan. 20, 1911. Switzerland is so remote, and so ill at ease is the conventional explanation here, that Nature, 85-451, says of this rain that in certain conditions of weather, snow may take on an appearance of blackness that is quite deceptive.

May be so. Or at night, if dark enough, snow may look black. This is simply denying that a black rain fell in Switzerland, Jan. 20, 1911.

Extreme remoteness from great manufacturing centers:

La Nature, 1888, 2-406:

That Aug. 14, 1888, there fell at the Cape of Good Hope, a rain so black as to be described as a "shower of ink."

Continuity dogs us. Continuity rules us and pulls us back. We seemed to have a little hope that by the method of extremes we could get away from things that merge indistinguishably into other things. We find that every departure from one merger is entrance upon another. At the Cape of Good Hope, vast volumes of smoke from great manufacturing centers, as an explanation, can not very acceptably merge with the explanation of extra-mundane origin—but smoke from a terrestial volcano can, and that is the suggestion that is made in La Nature.

There is, in human intellection, no real standard to judge by, but our acceptance, for the present, is that the more nearly positive will prevail. By the more nearly positive we mean the more nearly Organized. Everything merges away into everything else, but proportionately to its complexity, if unified, a thing seems strong, real, and distinct: so, in aesthetics, it is recognized that diversity in unity is higher beauty, or approximation to Beauty, than is simpler unity; so the logicians feel that agreement of diverse data constitute greater convincingness, or strength, than that of mere parallel instances: so to Herbert Spencer the more highly differentiated and integrated is the more fully evolved. Our opponents hold out for mundane origin of all black rains. Our method will be the presenting of diverse phenomena in agreement with the notion of some other origin. We take up not only black rains but black rains and their accompanying phenomena.

A correspondent to Knowledge, 5-190, writes of a black rain that fell in the Clyde Valley, March 1, 1884: of another black rain that fell two days later. According to the correspondent, a black rain had fallen in the Clyde Valley, March 20, 1828: then again March 22, 1828. According to Nature, 9-43, a black rain fell at