Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/75

Rh Objects that fell at Peshawur, India, June, 1893, during a storm: substance that looked like crystallized nitre, and that tasted like sugar (Native, July 13, 1893).

I suppose sometimes deep-sea fishes have their noses bumped by cinders. If their regions be subjacent to Cunard or White Star routes, they're especially likely to be bumped. I conceive of no inquiry: they're deep-sea fishes.

Or the slag of Slains. That it was a furnace-product. The Rev. James Rust seemed to feel bumped. He tried in vain to arouse inquiry.

As to a report, from Chicago, April 9, 1879, that slag had fallen from the sky, Prof. E. S. Bastian (Amer. Jour. Sci., 3-18-78) says that the slag "had been on the ground in the first place." It was furnace-slag. "A chemical examination of the specimens has shown that they possess none of the characteristics of true meteorites."

Over and over and over again, the universal delusion; hope and despair of attempted positivism; that there can be real criteria, or distinct characteristics of anything. If anybody can define—not merely suppose, like Prof. Bastian, that he can define—the true characteristics of anything, or so localize trueness anywhere, he makes the discovery for which the cosmos is laboring. He will be instantly translated, like Elijah, into the Positive Absolute. My own notion is that, in a moment of super-concentration, Elijah became so nearly a real prophet that he was translated to heaven, or to the Positive Absolute, with such velocity that he left an incandescent train behind him. As we go along, we shall find the "true test of meteoritic material," which in the past has been taken as an absolute, dissolving into almost utmost nebulosity. Prof. Bastian explains mechanically, or in terms of the usual reflexes to all reports of unwelcome substances: that near where the slag had been found, telegraph wires had been struck by lightning; that particles of melted wire had been seen to fall near the slag—which had been on the ground in the first place. But, according to the N. Y. Times, April 14, 1879, about two bushels of this substance had fallen.

Something that was said to have fallen at Darmstadt, June 7, 1846; listed by Greg (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1867-416) as "only slag."

Philosophical Magazine, 4-10-381:

That, in 1855, a large stone was found far in the interior of a tree, in Battersea Fields.