28 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



whli an appearance of liberality. I grant thirty or forty points to 

 3tart with. I'm as liberal as any of them or that my liberality 

 won't cost me anything the enormousness of the data that we 

 shall have. ' 



Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma, and the 

 way it works out: 



In the American Journal of Science, 1-42-196, we are told of a 

 yellow substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one 

 "windless" night in June, in Pictou Harbor, Nova Scotia. The 

 writer analyzed the substance, and it was found to "give off nitro- 

 gen and ammonia and an animal odor." 



Now, one of our Intermediatist principles, to start with, is that 

 so far from positive, in the aspect of Hcmogeneousness, are all 

 substances, that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, 

 anything can be found anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of 

 Greenland; bugs of a valley on the top of Mt. Blanc; atheists at a 

 prayer meeting; ice in India. For instance, chemical analysis can 

 reveal that almost any dead man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll 

 say, because there is no stomach without some iron, lead, tin, gold, 

 arsenic in it and of it which, of course, in a broader sense, doesn't 

 matter much, because a certain number of persons must, as a re- 

 straining influence, be executed 'for murder every year; and, if 

 detectives aren't able really to detect anything, illusion of their 

 success is all that is necessary, and it is very honorable to give up 

 one's life for society as a whole. 



The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictou sent a sample 

 to the Editor of the Journal. The Editor of course found pollen 

 in it. 



My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in it: 

 that nothing could very well fall through the air, in June, near the 

 pine forests of Nova Scotia, and escape all floating spores of pollen. 

 But the Editor does not say that this substance "contained" pollen. 

 He disregards "nitrogen, ammonia, and an animal odor," and says 

 that the substance was pollen. For the sake of our thirty or 

 forty tokens of liberality, or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really 

 liberal, we grant that the chemist of the first examination probably 

 wouldn't know an animal odor if he were janitor of a menagerie. 

 As we go along, however, there can be no such sweeping ignoring 

 of this phenomenon: 



The fall of animal-matter from the sky. 



