BOOK OF THE DAMNED 195 



These are only the observations conventionally listed relatively to 

 an Intra-Mercurial planet. They are formidable enough to prevent 

 our being diverted, as if it were all the dream of a lonely amateur 

 but they're a mere advance-guard. From now on other data of large 

 celestial bodies, some dark and some reflecting light, will pass and 

 pass and keep on passing 



So that some of us will remember a thing or two, after the pro- 

 cession's over possibly. 



Taking up only one of the listed observations 



Or our impression that the discrediting of Leverrier has nothing to 

 do with the acceptability of these data: 



In the London Times, Jan. 10, 1860, is Benjamin Scott's account 

 of his observation: 



That, in the summer of 1847, he had seen a body that had seemed 

 to be the size of Venus, crossing the sun. He says that, hardly be- 

 lieving the evidence of his sense of sight, he had looked for some 

 one, whose hopes or ambitions would not make him so subject to 

 illusion. He had told his little son, aged five years, to look through 

 the telescope. The child had exclaimed that he had seen "a little 

 balloon" crossing the sun. Scott says that he had not had sufficient 

 self-reliance to make public announcement of his remarkable ob- 

 servation at the time, but that, in the evening of the same day, he 

 had told Dr. Dick, F.R.A.S., who had cited other instances. In the 

 Times, Jan. 12, 1860, is published a letter from Richard Abbott, 

 F.R.A.S.: that he remembered Mr. Scott's letter to him upon this 

 observation, at the time of the occurrence. 



I suppose that, at the beginning of this chapter, one had the notion 

 that, by hard scratching through musty old records we might rake up 

 vague, more than doubtful data, distortable into what's called evi- 

 dence of unrecognized worlds or constructions of planetary size 



But the high authenticity and the support and the modernity of 

 these of the accursed that we are now considering 



And our acceptance that ours is a quasi-existence, in which above 

 all other things, hopes, ambitions, emotions, motivations, stands 

 Attempt to Positivize: that we are here considering an attempt to 

 systematize that is sheer fanaticism in its disregard of the unsys- 

 tematizable that it represented the highest good in the igth cen- 

 tury that it is mono-mania, but heroic mono-mania that was quasi- 

 divine in the igth century 



But that this isn't the ipth century. 



As a doubly sponsored Brahmin in the regard of Baptists the 



