iyo BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



"produce" ham sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted by 

 us, we correlate it with a datum reported by a Weather Bureau 

 observer, signifying that, whether the pebbles had been somewhere 

 aloft a long time or not, some of the hailstones that fell with them, 

 had been. The datum is that some of these hailstones were com- 

 posed of from twenty to twenty-five layers alternately of clear ice 

 and snow-ice. In orthodox terms I argue that a fair-sized hailstone 

 falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to warm it so that it 

 would not take on even one layer of ice. To put on twenty layers 

 of ice, I conceive of something that had not fallen at all, but had 

 rolled somewhere, at a leisurely rate, for a long time. 



We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two 

 respects: 



Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Orenburg, Russia, 

 Sept., 1824 (PhU. Mag., 4-8-463). 



A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25, 1825 

 (Qi4ar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 1828-1-447). 



I now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first I came upon 

 these data I was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects 

 of Orenburg were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of 

 iron. I had no notion of metallic objects that might have been 

 shaped or molded by means other than crystallization, until I came 

 to Arago's account of these occurrences (CEuvres, 11-644). Here 

 the analysis gives 70 per cent, red oxide of iron, and sulphur and 

 loss by ignition 5 per cent. It seems to me acceptable that iron with 

 considerably less than 5 per cent, sulphur in it is not iron pyrites 

 then little, rusty iron objects, shaped by some other means, have 

 fallen, four months apart, at the same place. M. Arago expresses 

 astonishment at this phenomenon of recurrence so familiar to us. 



Altogether, I find opening before us, vistas of heresies to which I, 

 for one, must shut my eyes. I have always been in sympathy with 

 the dogmatists and exclusionists: that is plain in our opening lines: 

 that to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to 

 exclude. It is only that exclusionists who are good in the nineteenth 

 century are evil in the twentieth century. Constantly we feel a 

 merging away into infinitude; but that this book shall approximate 

 to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization, or that 

 we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves 

 back constantly from wandering off into infinitude. The thing that 

 we do, however, is to make our own outline, or the difference be- 

 tween what we include and what we exclude, vague. 



