Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/76

70 Sometimes cannon balls are found embedded in trees. Doesn't seem to be anything to discuss; doesn't seem discussable that any one would cut a hole in a tree and hide a cannon ball, which one could take to bed, and hide under one's pillow, just as easily. So with the stone of Battersea Fields. What is there to say, except that it fell with high velocity and embedded in the tree? Nevertheless, there was a great deal of discussion

Because, at the foot of the tree, as if broken off the stone, fragments of slag were found.

I have nine other instances.

Slag and cinders and ashes, and you won't believe, and neither will I, that they came from the furnaces of vast aerial super-constructions. We'll see what looks acceptable.

As to ashes, the difficulties are great, because we'd expect many falls of terrestrially derived ashes—volcanoes and forest fires.

In some of our acceptances, I have felt a little radical

I suppose that one of our main motives is to show that there is, in quasi-existence, nothing but the preposterous—or something intermediate to absolute preposterousness and final reasonableness—that the new is the obviously preposterous; that it becomes the established and disguisedly preposterous; that it is displaced, after a while, and is again seen to be the preposterous. Or that all progress is from the outrageous to the academic or sanctified, and back to the outrageous—modified, however, by a trend of higher and higher approximation to the impreposterous. Sometimes I feel a little more uninspired than at other times, but I think we're pretty well accustomed now to the oneness of allness; or that the methods of science in maintaining its system are as outrageous as the attempts of the damned to break in. In the Annual Record of Science, 1875-241, Prof. Daubrée is quoted: that ashes that had fallen in the Azores had come from the Chicago fire

Or the damned and the saved, and there's little to choose between them; and angels are beings that have not obviously barbed tails to them—or never have such bad manners as to stroke an angel below the waist-line.

However this especial outrage was challenged: the Editor of the Record returns to it, in the issue of 1876: considers it "in the highest degree improper to say that the ashes of Chicago were landed in the Azores."

''Bull. Soc. Astro. de France'', 22-245:

Account of a white substance, like ashes, that fell at Annoy,