BOOK OF THE DAMNED 47 



it as a jelly-like material, supposed to have been the "dried" spawn 

 either of fishes or of some batrachian. 



Or this is why, against the seemingly insuperable odds against all 

 things new, there can be what is called progress 



That nothing is positive, in the aspects of homogeneity and unity: 



If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only 

 unreal combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity. Every 

 resistance is itself divided into parts resisting one another. The 

 simplest strategy seems to be never bother to fight a thing: set 

 its own parts fighting one another. 



We are merging away from carnal to gelatinous substance, and 

 here there is an abundance of instances or reports of instances. These 

 data are so improper they're obscene to the science of to-day, but we 

 shall see that science, before it became so rigorous, was not so 

 prudish. Chladni was not, and Greg was not. 



I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often 

 fallen from the sky 



Or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous? 



That meteors tear through and detach fragments? 



That fragments are brought down by storms? 



That the twinkling of stars is penetration of light through some- 

 thing that quivers? 



I think, myself, that it would be absurd to say that the whole sky 

 is gelatinous: it seems more acceptable that only certain areas are. 



Humboldt (Cosmos, 1-119) says that all our data in this respect 

 must be "classed amongst the mythical fables of mythology." He 

 is very sure, but just a little redundant. 



We shall be opposed by the standard resistances: 



There in the first place; 



Up from one place, in a whirlwind, and down in another. 



We shall not bother to be very convincing one way or another, 

 because of the over-shadowing of the datum with which we shall 

 end up. It will mean that something had been in a stationary posi- 

 tion for several days over a small part of a small town in England: 

 this is the revolutionary thing that we have alluded to before; 

 whether the substance were nostoc, or spawn, or some kind of a larval 

 nexus, doesn't matter so much. If it stood in the sky for several 

 days, we rank with Moses as a chronicler of improprieties or was 

 that story, or datum, we mean, told by Moses? Then we shall have 

 so many records of gelatinous substance said to have fallen with 

 meteorites, that, between the two phenomena, some of us will have 



