52 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



I have tabulated all the data of this book, and a great deal 

 besides card system and several proximities, thus emphasized, 

 have been revelations to me: nevertheless, it is only the method of 

 theologians and scientists worst of all, of statisticians. 



For instance, by the statistic method, I could "prove" that a 

 black rain has fallen "regularly" every seven months, somewhere 

 upon this earth. To do this, I'd have to include red rains and 

 yellow rains, but, conventionally, I'd pick out the black particles 

 in red substances and in yellow substances, and disregard the rest. 

 Then, too, if here and there, a black rain should be a week early 

 or a month late that would be "acceleration" or "retardation." 

 This is supposed to be legitimate in working out the periodicities 

 of comets. If black rains, or red or yellow rains with black par- 

 ticles in them, should not appear at all near some dates we have 

 not read Darwin in vain "the records are not complete." As to 

 other, interfering black rains, they'd be either gray or brown, or 

 for them we'd find other periodicities. 



Still, I have had to notice the year 1819, for instance. I shall 

 not note them all in this book, but I have records of 31 extraor- 

 dinary events in 1883. Some one should write a book upon the 

 phenomena of this one year that is if books should be written. 

 1849 is notable for extraordinary falls, so far apart that a local 

 explanation seems inadequate not only the black rain of Ireland, 

 May, 1849, but a red rain in Sicily and a red rain in Wales. Also, 

 it is said (Timb's Year Book, 1850-241) that, upon April 18 or 

 20, 1849, shepherds near Mt. Araat, found a substance that was 

 not indigenous, upon areas measuring 8 to 10 miles in circumfer- 

 ence. Presumably it had fallen there. 



We have already gone into the subject of Science and its attempted 

 positiveness, and its resistances in that it must have relations of 

 service. It is very easy to see that most of the theoretic science 

 of the 1 9th century was only a relation of reaction against theologic 

 dogma, and has no more to do with Truth than has a wave that 

 bounds back from a shore. Or, if a shop girl, or you or I, should 

 pull out a piece of chewing gum about a yard long, that would be 

 quite as scientific a performance as was the stretching of this 

 earth's age several hundred million of years. 



All "things" are not things, but only relations, or expressions 

 of relations: but all relations are striving to be the unrelated, or 

 have surrendered to, and subordinated to, higher attempts. So there 

 is a positivist aspect to this reaction that is itself only a relation, and 



