BOOK OF THE DAMNED 181 



atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of 

 the palm of the hand." 



This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the "damned," 

 or before we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried 

 condemnation by infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied but with- 

 out comment in the Scientific American, 71-371. 



Our theology is something like this: 



Of course we ought to be damned but we revolt against adjudi- 

 cation by infants, turtles, and lambs. 



We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult de- 

 partment of super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There's 

 a lesson to me in the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our 

 opposition is in the clearness with which the conventional, but im- 

 possible, becomes the imaginable, and then the resistant to modifi- 

 cations. After it had become the conventional with me, I con- 

 ceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a few miles above this earth 

 then the shining of the sun, and the ice partly melting that note 

 upon the ice that fell at Derby water trickling and forming icicles 

 upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I seemed to look up and 

 so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like stalactites from a 

 flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at the under side 

 of an aerial ice-lump, and seemed to see a papillation similar to that 

 observed by a calf at times. But then but then if icicles should 

 form upon the under side of a sheet of aerial ice, that would be 

 by the falling of water toward this earth; an icicle is of course an 

 expression of gravitation and, if water melting from ice should 

 fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an icicle 

 could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where 

 everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the 

 ice does not, because the ice is heavier that is, in masses. That 

 notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are 

 taking at present. 



Our expression upon icicles: 



A vast field of aerial ice it is inert to this earth's gravitation 

 but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this 

 earth, and is susceptible to gravitation by cohesion with the main 

 mass, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, 

 and forms icicles then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes 

 falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles. 



Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque, 

 Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said (Monthly Weather Review, June, 



