Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/42

36 Such disagreements don't look very well, so, in Nature, 68-109, one of the differing chemists explains. He says that his analysis was of muddy rain, and the other was of sediment of rain

We're quite ready to accept excuses from the most high, though I do wonder whether we're quite so damned as we were, if we find ourselves in a gracious and tolerant mood toward the powers that condemn—but the tax that now comes upon our good manners and unwillingness to be too severe

Nature, 68-223:

Another chemist. He says it was 23.49 per cent water and organic matter.

He "identifies" this matter as sand from an African desert—but after deducting organic matter But you and I could be "identified" as sand from an African desert, after deducting all there is to us except sand

Why we can not accept that this fall was of sand from the Sahara, omitting the obvious objection that in most parts the Sahara is not red at all, but is usually described as "dazzling white"

The enormousness of it: that a whirlwind might have carried it, but that, in that case it would be no supposititious, or doubtfully identified whirlwind, but the greatest atmospheric cataclysm in the history of this earth:

''Jour. Roy. Met. Soc.'', 30-56:

That, up to the 27th of February, this fall had continued in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Austria; that in some instances it was not sand, or that almost all the matter was organic: that a vessel had reported the fall as occurring in the Atlantic Ocean, midway between Southampton and the Barbados. The calculation is given that, in England alone, 10,000,000 tons of matter had fallen. It had fallen in Switzerland (Symons' Met. Mag., March, 1903). It had fallen in Russia (Bull. Com. Geolog., 22-48). Not only had a vast quantity of matter fallen several months before, in Australia, but it was at this time falling in Australia (Victorian Naturalist, June, 1903)—enormously—red mud—fifty tons per square mile.

The Wessex explanation

Or that every explanation is a Wessex explanation: by that I mean an attempt to interpret the enormous in terms of the minute—but that nothing can be finally explained, because by Truth we mean the Universal; and that even if we could think as wide as Universality, that would not be requital to the cosmic quest—which