BOOK OF THE DAMNED 69 



Objects that fell at Peshawur, India, June, 1893, during a storm: 

 substance that looked like crystallized nitre, and that tasted like 

 sugar (Native, July 13, 1893). 



I suppose sometimes deep-sea fishes have their noses bumped 

 by cinders. If their regions be subjacent to Cunard or White Star 

 routes, they're especially likely to be bumped. I conceive of no 

 inquiry: they're deep-sea fishes. 



Or the slag of Slains. That it was a furnace-product. The Rev. 

 James Rust seemed to feel bumped. He tried in vain to arouse 

 inquiry. 



As to a report, from Chicago, April 9, 1879, that slag had fallen 

 from the sky, Prof. E. S. Bastian (Amer. Jour. Sci., 3-18-78) 

 says that the slag "had been on the ground in the first place." It 

 was furnace-slag. "A chemical examination of the specimens has 

 shown that they possess none of the characteristics of true meteorites.'* 



Over and over and over again, the universal delusion; hope and 

 despair of attempted positivism; that there can be real criteria, or 

 distinct characteristics of anything. If anybody can define not 

 merely suppose, like Prof. Bastian, that he can define the true 

 characteristics of anything, or so localize trueness anywhere, he 

 makes the discovery for which the cosmos is laboring. He will .be 

 instantly translated, like Elijah, into the Positive Absolute. My 

 own notion is that, in a moment of super-concentration, Elijah 

 became so nearly a real prophet that he was translated to heaven* 

 or to the Positive Absolute, with such velocity that he left an in- 

 candescent train behind him. As we go along, we shall find the 

 "true test of meteoritic material," which in the past has been taken 

 as an absolute, dissolving into almost utmost nebulosity. Prof. 

 Bastian explains mechanically, or in terms of the usual reflexes to 

 all reports of unwelcome substances: that near where the slag had 

 been found, telegraph wires had been struck by lightning; that 

 particles of melted wire had been seen to fall near the slag which 

 had been on the ground in the first place. But, according to the 

 N. Y. Times, April 14, 1879, about two bushels of this substance 

 had fallen. 



Something that was said to have fallen at Darmstadt, June 7, 

 1846; listed by Greg (Kept. Brit. Assoc., 1867-416) as "only 

 slag." 



Philosophical Magazine, 4-10-381: 



That, in 1855, a large stone was found far in the interior of a 

 tree, in Battersea Fields. 



