174 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



cold meteorites. It is simply that he had no power to remember 

 such irreconcilabilities. 



And then Mr. Symons again. Mr. Symons was a man who prob- 

 ably did more for the science of meteorology than did any other 

 man of his time: therefore he probably did more to hold back the 

 science of meteorology than did any other man of his time. In 

 Nature, 41-135, Mr. Symons says that Prof. Schwedoff's ideas are 

 "very droll." 



I think that even more amusing is our own acceptance that, not 

 very far above this earth's surface, is a region that will be the 

 subject of a whole new science super-geography with which we 

 shall immortalize ourselves in the resentments of the schoolboys of 

 the future 



Pebbles and fragments of meteors and things from Mars and 

 Jupiter and Azuria: wedges, delayed messages, cannon balls, bricks, 

 nails, coal and coke and charcoal and offensive old cargoes things 

 that coat in ice in some regions and things that get into areas so 

 warm that they putrefy or that there are all the climates of geog- 

 raphy in super-geography. I shall have to accept that, floating in 

 the sky of this earth, there often are fields of ice as extensive as 

 those on the Arctic Ocean volumes of water in which are many 

 fishes and frogs tracts of land covered with caterpillars 



Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out 

 and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find 

 messages from other worlds and within three weeks there's a big 

 trade worked up in forged messages. Sometime I shall write a 

 guide book to the Super-Sagasso Sea, for aviators, but just at pres- 

 ent there wouldn't be much call for it. 



We now have more of our expression upon hail as a concomitant, 

 or more data of things that have fallen from the sky, with hail. 



In general, the expression is: 



These things may have been raised from some other part of the 

 earth's surface, in whirlwinds, or may not have fallen, and may 

 have been upon the ground, in the first place but were the hail- 

 stones found with them, raised frcm some other part of the earth's 

 surface, or were the hailstones upon the ground, in the first place? 



As I said before, this expression is meaningless as to a few in- 

 stances; it is reasonable to think of some coincidence between the 

 fall of hail and the fall of other things: but, inasmuch as there have 

 been a good many instances, we begin to suspect that this is not 

 so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coinci- 



