BOOK OF THE DAMNED 27 



Darwinism i 



That survivors survive. 



Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or abso- 

 lutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted 

 coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency 

 than did the inchoate speculations that preceded it. 



Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round. 



Shadow of the earth on the moon? 



No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is 

 much larger than the moon. If the periphery of the shadow is 

 curved but the convex moon a straight-edged object will cast a 

 curved shadow upon a surface that is convex. 



All the other so-called proofs may be taken up in the same way. 

 It was impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. 

 It was not required: only that with a higher seeming of positiveness 

 than that of his opponents, he should attempt. The thing to do, 

 in 1492, was nevertheless to accept that beyond Europe, to the 

 west, were other lands. 



I offer for acceptance, as something concordant with the spirit 

 of this first quarter of the 2oth century, the expression that beyond 

 this earth are other lands from which come things as, from 

 America, float things to Europe. 



As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the 

 endeavor to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all 

 yellow rains and yellow snows are colored with pollen from this 

 earth's pine trees. Symons' Meteorological Magazine is especially 

 prudish in this respect and regards as highly improper all advances 

 made by other explainers. 



Nevertheless, the Monthly Weather Review, May, 1877, reports a 

 golden-yellow fall, of Feb. 27, 1877, at Peckloh, Germany, in which 

 four kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There 

 were minute things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and 

 disks. 



They may have been symbols. They may have been objective 

 hieroglyphics 



Mere passing fancy let it go 



In the Annales de Chimie, 85-288, there is a list of rains said 

 to have contained sulphur. I have thirty or forty other notes. 

 I'll not use one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon 

 a fall of pollen. I said, to begin with, that our methods would be 

 the methods of theologians and scientists, and they always begin 



