BOOK OF THE DAMNED 173 



And Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all 

 things. 



So the members of the British Association. To some of them 

 Prof. Schwedoff's ideas were like slaps on the back of an environ- 

 ment-denying turtle: to some of them his heresy was like an offering 

 of meat, raw and dripping, to milk-fed lambs. Some of them 

 bleated like lambs, and some of them turled like turtles. We used 

 to crucify, but now we ridicule: or, in the loss of vigor of all prog- 

 ress, the spike has etherealized into the laugh. 



Sir William Thomson ridiculed the heresy, with the phantomosi- 

 ties of his era: 



That all bodies, such as hailstones, if away from this earth's at- 

 mosphere, would have to move at planetary velocity which would 

 be positively reasonable if the pronouncements of St. Isaac were 

 anything but articles of faith that a hailstone falling through this 

 earth's atmosphere, with planetary velocity, would perform 13,000 

 times as much work as would raise an equal weight of water one 

 degree centigrade, and therefore never fall as a hailstone at all; be 

 more than melted super-volatalized 



These turls and these bleats of pedantry though we insist that, 

 relatively to 1882, these turls and bleats should be regarded as re- 

 spectfully as we regard rag dolls that keep infants occupied and 

 noiseless it is the survival of rag dolls into maturity that we object 

 to so these pious and nai've ones who believed that 13,000 times 

 something could have that is, in quasi-existence an exact and 

 calculable resultant, whereas there is in quasi-existence nothing 

 that can, except by delusion and convenience, be called a unit, in 

 the first place whose devotions to St. Isaac required blind belief in 

 formulas of falling bodies 



Against data that were piling up, in their own time, of slow-falling 

 meteorites; "milk warm" ones admitted even by Farrington and 

 Merrill; at least one icy meteorite nowhere denied by the present 

 orthodoxy, a datum as accessible to Thomson, in 1882, as it is now 

 to us, because it was an occurrence of 1860. Beans and needles and 

 tacks and a magnet. Needles and tacks adhere to and systematize 

 relatively to a magnet, but, if some beans, too, be caught up, they 

 are irreconcilables to this system and drop right out of it. A mem- 

 ber of the Salvation Army may hear over and over data that seem 

 so memorable to an evolutionist. It seems remarkable that they do 

 not influence him one finds that he can not remember them. It is 

 incredible that Sir William Thomson had never heard of slow-falling, 



