Chapter 17

"The foreman of the Novelty Iron Works, of this city, states that in two large hailstones melted by him were found small living frogs." But the pieces of ice that fell upon this occasion had a peculiarity that indicates--though by as bizarre an indication as any we've had yet--that they had been for a long time motionless or floating somewhere. We'll take that up soon.

_Living Age_, 52-186:

That, June 30, 1841, fishes, one of which was ten inches long, fell at Boston; that, eight days later, fishes and ice fell at Derby.

In Timb's _Year Book_, 1842-275, it is said that, at Derby, the fishes had fallen in enormous numbers; from half an inch to two inches long, and some considerably larger. In the _Athenæum_, 1841-542, copied from the Sheffield _Patriot_, it is said that one of the fishes weighed three ounces. In several accounts, it is said that, with the fishes, fell many small frogs and "pieces of half-melted ice." We are told that the frogs and the fishes had been raised from some other part of the earth's surface, in a whirlwind; no whirlwind specified; nothing said as to what part of the earth's surface comes ice, in the month of July--interests us that the ice is described as "half-melted." In the London _Times_, July 15, 1841, it is said that the fishes were sticklebacks; that they had fallen with ice and small frogs, many of which had survived the fall. We note that, at Dunfermline, three months later (Oct. 7, 1841) fell many fishes, several inches in length, in a thunderstorm. (London _Times_, Oct. 12, 1841.)

Hailstones, we don't care so much about. The matter of stratification seems significant, but we think more of the fall of lumps of ice from the sky, as possible data of the Super-Sargasso Sea:

Lumps of ice, a foot in circumference, Derbyshire, England, May 12, 1811 (_Annual Register_, 1811-54); cuboidal mass, six inches in diameter, that fell at Birmingham, 26 days later (Thomson, _Intro. to Meteorology_, p. 179); size of pumpkins, Bangalore, India, May 22, 1851 (_Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1855-35); masses of ice of a pound and a half each, New Hampshire, Aug. 13, 1851 (Lummis, _Meteorology_, p. 129); masses of ice, size of a man's head, in the Delphos tornado (Ferrel, _Popular Treatise_, p. 428); large as a man's hand, killing thousands of sheep, Texas, May 3, 1877 (_Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1877); "pieces of ice so large that they could not be grasped in one hand," in a tornado, in Colorado, June 24, 1877 (_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1877); lumps of ice four and a half inches long, Richmond, England, Aug. 2, 1879 (_Symons' Met. Mag._, 14-100); mass of ice, 21 inches in circumference that fell with hail, Iowa, June, 1881 (_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1881); "pieces of ice" eight inches long, and an inch and a half thick, Davenport, Iowa, Aug. 30, 1882 (_Monthly Weather Review_, Aug., 1882); lump of ice size of a brick; weight two pounds, Chicago, July 12, 1883 (_Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1883); lumps of ice that weighed one pound and a half each, India, May (?), 1888 (_Nature_, 37-42); lump of ice weighing four pounds, Texas, Dec. 6, 1893 (_Sc. Am._, 68-58); lumps of ice one pound in weight, Nov. 14, 1901, in a tornado, Victoria (_Meteorology of Australia_, p. 34).

Of course it is our acceptance that these masses not only accompanied tornadoes, but were brought down to this earth by tornadoes.

Flammarion, _The Atmosphere_, p. 34:

Block of ice, weighing four and a half pounds that fell at Cazorta, Spain, June 15, 1829; block of ice, weighing eleven pounds, at Cette, France, October, 1844; mass of ice three feet long, three feet wide, and more than two feet thick, that fell, in a storm, in Hungary, May 8, 1802.

_Scientific American_, 47-119:

That, according to the _Salina Journal_, a mass of ice weighing about 80 pounds had fallen from the sky, near Salina, Kansas, August, 1882. We are told that Mr. W.J. Hagler, the North Santa Fé merchant became possessor of it, and packed it in sawdust in his store.

London _Times_, April 7, 1860:

That, upon the 16th of March, 1860, in a snowstorm, in Upper Wasdale, blocks of ice, so large that at a distance they looked like a flock of sheep, had fallen.

_Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1851-32:

That a mass of ice about a cubic yard in size had fallen at Candeish, India, 1828.

Against these data, though, so far as I know, so many of them have never been assembled together before, there is a silence upon the part of scientific men that is unusual. Our Super-Sargasso Sea may not be an unavoidable conclusion, but arrival upon this earth of ice from external regions does seem to be--except that there must be, be it ever so faint, a merger. It is in the notion that these masses of ice are only congealed hailstones. We have data against this notion, as applied to all our instances, but the explanation has been offered, and, it seems to me, may apply in some instances. In the _Bull. Soc. Astro. de France_, 20-245, it is said of blocks of ice the size of decanters that had fallen at Tunis that they were only masses of congealed hailstones.

London _Times_, Aug. 4, 1857.

That a block of ice, described as "pure" ice, weighing 25 pounds, had been found in the meadow of Mr. Warner, of Cricklewood. There had been a storm the day before. As in some of our other instances, no one had seen this object fall from the sky. It was found after the storm: that's all that can be said about it.

Letter from Capt. Blakiston, communicated by Gen. Sabine, to the Royal Society (_London Roy. Soc. Proc._, 10-468):

That, Jan. 14, 1860, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice had fallen upon Capt. Blakiston's vessel--that it was not hail. "It was not hail, but irregular-shaped pieces of solid ice of different dimensions, up to the size of half a brick."

According to the _Advertiser-Scotsman_, quoted by the Edinburgh _New Philosophical Magazine_, 47-371, an irregular-shaped mass of ice fell at Ord, Scotland, August, 1849, after "an extraordinary peal of thunder."

It is said that this was homogeneous ice, except in a small part, which looked like congealed hailstones.

The mass was about 20 feet in circumference.

The story, as told in the London _Times_, Aug. 14, 1849, is that, upon the evening of the 13th of August, 1849, after a loud peal of thunder, a mass of ice said to have been 20 feet in circumference, had fallen upon the estate of Mr. Moffat, of Balvullich, Ross-shire. It is said that this object fell alone, or without hailstones.

Altogether, though it is not so strong for the Super-Sargasso Sea, I think this is one of our best expressions upon external origins. That large blocks of ice could form in the moisture of this earth's atmosphere is about as likely as that blocks of stone could form in a dust whirl. Of course, if ice or water comes to this earth from external sources, we think of at least minute organisms in it, and on, with our data, to frogs, fishes; on to anything that's thinkable, coming from external sources. It's of great importance to us to accept that large lumps of ice have fallen from the sky, but what we desire most--perhaps because of our interest in its archaeologic and palaeontologic treasures--is now to be through with tentativeness and probation, and to take the Super-Sargasso Sea into full acceptance in our more advanced fold of the chosen of this twentieth century.

In the _Report of the British Association_, 1855-37, it is said that, at Poorhundur, India, Dec. 11, 1854, flat pieces of ice, many of them weighing several pounds--each, I suppose--had fallen from the sky. They are described as "large ice-flakes."

Vast fields of ice in the Super-Arctic regions, or strata, of the Super-Sargasso Sea. When they break up, their fragments are flake-like. In our acceptance, there are aerial ice-fields that are remote from this earth; that break up, fragments grinding against one another, rolling in vapor and water, of different constituency in different regions, forming slowly as stratified hailstones--but that there are ice-fields near this earth, that break up into just such flat pieces of ice as cover any pond or river when ice of a pond or river is broken, and are sometimes soon precipitated to the earth, in this familiar flat formation.

_Symons' Met. Mag._, 43-154:

A correspondent writes that, at Braemar, July 2, 1908, when the sky was clear overhead, and the sun shining, flat pieces of ice fell--from somewhere. The sun was shining, but something was going on somewhere: thunder was heard.

Until I saw the reproduction of a photograph in the _Scientific American_, Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be, say, at least ten or twenty miles away from this earth, and invisible, to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by the _Scientific American_ is of an aggregation supposed to be clouds, presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are they. The writer says that they looked to him like "a field of broken ice." Beneath is a picture of a conventional field of ice, floating ordinarily in water. The resemblance between the two pictures is striking--nevertheless, it seems to me incredible that the first of the photographs could be of an aerial ice-field, or that gravitation could cease to act at only a mile or so from this earth's surface--

Unless:

The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.

Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen miles outward--but that gravitation must be rhythmic.

Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only insecure approximations.

We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping arrogance, to Herbert Spencer's chapters upon the rhythm of all phenomena.

If everything else--light from the stars, heat from the sun, the winds and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; demands and supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic reactions and religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the ticking of clocks; and arrival and departure of the seasons--if everything else is variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed and formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like all other illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is intermediatism to accept that, though gravitation may approximate higher to invariability than do the winds, for instance, it must be somewhere between the Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here then we are not much impressed with the opposition of physicists and astronomers, fearing, a little mournfully, that their language is of expiring sibilations.

So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be seen in detail. For description of what I call a "blur," see _Pop. Sci. News_, February, 1884--sky, in general, unusually clear, but, near the sun, "a white, slightly curdled haze, which was dazzlingly bright."

We accept that sometimes fields of ice pass between the sun and the earth: that many strata of ice, or very thick fields of ice, or superimposed fields would obscure the sun--that there have been occasions when the sun was eclipsed by fields of ice:

Flammarion, _The Atmosphere_, p. 394:

That a profound darkness came upon the city of Brussels, June 18, 1839:

There fell flat pieces of ice, an inch long.

Intense darkness at Aitkin, Minn., April 2, 1889: sand and "solid chunks of ice" reported to have fallen (_Science_, April 19, 1889).

In _Symons' Meteorological Magazine_, 32-172, are outlined rough-edged but smooth-surfaced pieces of ice that fell at Manassas, Virginia, Aug. 10, 1897. They look as much like the roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice--as ever have roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice looked. About two inches across, and one inch thick. In _Cosmos_, 3-116, it is said that, at Rouen, July 5, 1853, fell irregular-shaped pieces of ice, about the size of a hand, described as looking as if all had been broken from one enormous block of ice. That, I think, was an aerial iceberg. In the awful density, or almost absolute stupidity of the 19th century, it never occurred to anybody to look for traces of polar bears or of seals upon these fragments.

Of course, seeing what we want to see, having been able to gather these data only because they are in agreement with notions formed in advance, we are not so respectful to our own notions as to a similar impression forced upon an observer who had no theory or acceptance to support. In general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this should not be taken as an absolute.

_Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1894:

That, from the Weather Bureau, of Portland, Oregon, a tornado, of June 3, 1894, was reported.

Fragments of ice fell from the sky.

They averaged three to four inches square, and about an inch thick. In length and breadth they had the smooth surfaces required by our acceptance: and, according to the writer in the _Review_, "gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the "damned," or before we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried condemnation by infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied--but without comment--in the _Scientific American_, 71-371.

Our theology is something like this:

Of course we ought to be damned--but we revolt against adjudication by infants, turtles, and lambs.

We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult department of super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There's a lesson to me in the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our opposition is in the clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a few miles above this earth--then the shining of the sun, and the ice partly melting--that note upon the ice that fell at Derby--water trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I seemed to look up and so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like stalactites from a flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at the under side of an aerial ice-lump, and seemed to see a papillation similar to that observed by a calf at times. But then--but then--if icicles should form upon the under side of a sheet of aerial ice, that would be by the falling of water toward this earth; an icicle is of course an expression of gravitation--and, if water melting from ice should fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an icicle could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the ice does not, because the ice is heavier--that is, in masses. That notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at present.

Our expression upon icicles:

A vast field of aerial ice--it is inert to this earth's gravitation--but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth, and is susceptible to gravitation--by cohesion with the main mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles--then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles.

Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said (_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1882) that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circumference, the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters--that upon some of them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these objects were not hailstones.

The only merger is that of knobby hailstones, or of large hailstones with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize--not forming by accretion--in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of such hailstones, see _Nature_, 61-594. Note the size--"some of them the size of turkeys' eggs."

It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen, as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the under side of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations.

_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1889:

That, at Oswego, N.Y., June 11, 1889, according to the Turin (N.Y.) _Leader_, there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that "resembled the fragments of icicles."

_Monthly Weather Review_, 29-506:

That on Florence Island, St. Lawrence River, Aug. 8, 1901, with ordinary hail, fell pieces of ice "formed like icicles, the size and shape of lead pencils that had been cut into sections about three-eighths of an inch in length."

So our data of the Super-Sargasso Sea, and its Arctic region: and, for weeks at a time, an ice field may hang motionless over a part of this earth's surface--the sun has some effect upon it, but not much until late in the afternoon, I should say--part of it has sagged, but is held up by cohesion with the main mass--whereupon we have such an occurrence as would have been a little uncanny to us once upon a time--or fall of water from a cloudless sky, day after day, in one small part of this earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun's rays had had time for their effects:

_Monthly Weather Review_, October, 1886:

That, according to the Charlotte _Chronicle_, Oct. 21, 1886, for three weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N.C., localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o'clock; that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.

This is the newspaper account, and, as such, it seems in the depths of the unchosen, either by me or any other expression of the Salvation Army. The account by the Signal Service observer, at Charlotte, published in the _Review_, follows:

"An unusual phenomenon was witnessed on the 21st: having been informed that, for some weeks prior to date, rain had been falling daily, after 3 P.M., on a particular spot, near two trees, corner of 9th and D streets, I visited the place, and saw precipitation in the form of rain drops at 4:47 and 4:55 P.M., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25 P.M., a light shower of rain fell from a cloudless sky.... Sometimes the precipitation falls over an area of half an acre, but always appears to center at these two trees, and when lightest occurs there only."

14

We see conventionally. It is not only that we think and act and speak and dress alike, because of our surrender to social attempt at Entity, in which we are only super-cellular. We see what it is "proper" that we should see. It is orthodox enough to say that a horse is not a horse, to an infant--any more than is an orange an orange to the unsophisticated. It's interesting to walk along a street sometimes and look at things and wonder what they'd look like, if we hadn't been taught to see horses and trees and houses as horses and trees and houses. I think that to super-sight they are local stresses merging indistinguishably into one another, in an all-inclusive nexus.

I think that it would be credible enough to say that many times have Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria crossed telescopic fields of vision, and were not even seen--because it wouldn't be proper to see them; it wouldn't be respectable, and it wouldn't be respectful: it would be insulting to old bones to see them: it would bring on evil influences from the relics of St. Isaac to see them.

But our data:

Of vast worlds that are orbitless, or that are navigable, or that are adrift in inter-planetary tides and currents: the data that we shall have of their approach, in modern times, within five or six miles of this earth--

But then their visits, or approaches, to other planets, or to other of the few regularized bodies that have surrendered to the attempted Entity of this solar system as a whole--

The question that we can't very well evade:

Have these other worlds, or super-constructions, ever been seen by astronomers?

I think there would not be much approximation to realness in taking refuge in the notion of astronomers who stare and squint and see only that which it is respectable and respectful to see. It is all very well to say that astronomers are hypnotics, and that an astronomer looking at the moon is hypnotized by the moon, but our acceptance is that the bodies of this present expression often visit the moon, or cross it, or are held in temporary suspension near it--then some of them must often have been within the diameter of an astronomer's hypnosis.

Our general expression:

That, upon the oceans of this earth, there are regularized vessels, but also that there are tramp vessels:

That, upon the super-ocean, there are regularized planets, but also that there are tramp worlds:

That astronomers are like mercantile purists who would deny commercial vagabondage.

Our acceptance is that vast celestial vagabonds have been excluded by astronomers, primarily because their irresponsibilities are an affront to the pure and the precise, or to attempted positivism; and secondarily because they have not been seen so very often. The planets steadily reflect the light of the sun: upon this uniformity a system that we call Primary Astronomy has been built up; but now the subject-matter of Advanced Astronomy is data of celestial phenomena that are sometimes light and sometimes dark, varying like some of the satellites of Jupiter, but with a wider range. However, light or dark, they have been seen and reported so often that the only important reason for their exclusion is--that they don't fit in.

With dark bodies that are probably external to our own solar system, I have, in the provincialism that no one can escape, not much concern. Dark bodies afloat in outer space would have been damned a few years ago, but now they're sanctioned by Prof. Barnard--and, if he says they're all right, you may think of them without the fear of doing something wrong or ridiculous--the close kinship we note so often between the evil and the absurd--I suppose by the ridiculous I mean the froth of evil. The dark companion of Algol, for instance. Though that's a clear case of celestial miscegenation, the purists, or positivists, admit that's so. In the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Science_, 1915-394, Prof. Barnard writes of an object--he calls it an "object"--in Cephus. His idea is that there are dark, opaque bodies outside this solar system. But in the _Astrophysical Journal_, 1916-1, he modifies into regarding them as "dark nebulæ." That's not so interesting.

We accept that Venus, for instance, has often been visited by other worlds, or by super-constructions, from which come ciders and coke and coal; that sometimes these things have reflected light and have been seen from this earth--by professional astronomers. It will be noted that throughout this chapter our data are accursed Brahmins--as, by hypnosis and inertia, we keep on and keep on saying, just as a good many of the scientists of the 19th century kept on and kept on admitting the power of the system that preceded them--or Continuity would be smashed. There's a big chance here for us to be instantaneously translated to the Positive Absolute--oh, well--