200 BOOK OF JHE DAMNED 



that there is very little to it. A dark object that was seen by 

 Prof. Heis, for eleven degrees of arc, moving slowly across the Milky 

 Way. (Greg's Catalogue, Kept. Brit. Assoc., 1867-426.) 



One of our quasi-reasons for accepting that orbitless worlds are 

 dirigible is the almost complete absence of data of collisions: of 

 course, though in defiance of gravitation, they may, without direc- 

 tion like human direction, adjust to one another in the way of 

 vortex rings of smoke a very human-like way that is. But in 

 Knowledge, Feb., 1894, are two photographs of Brooks' comet 

 that are shown as evidence of its seeming collision with a dark 

 object, Oct., 1893. Our own wording is that it "struck against 

 something": Prof. Barnard's is that it had "entered some dense 

 medium, which shattered it." For all I know it had knocked 

 against merely a field of ice. 



Melanicus. 



That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth 

 and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: 

 hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hun- 

 dreds of miles from tip to tip a super-evil thing that is exploiting 

 us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful. 



He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, 

 black, brooding vampire. 



Science, July 31, 1896: 



That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W. R. Brooks, 

 director of the Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object 

 pass rather slowly across the moon, in a horizontal direction. In 

 Mr. Brooks' opinion it was a dark meteor. In Science, Sept. 14, 

 1896, a correspondent writes that, in his opinion, it may have been 

 a bird. We shall have no trouble with the meteor and bird mergers, 

 if we have observations of long duration and estimates of size up 

 to hundreds of miles. As to the body that was seen by Brooks, 

 there is a note from the Dutch astronomer, Muller, in the Scientific 

 American, 75-251, that, upon April 4, 1892, he had seen a similar 

 phenomenon. In Science Gossip, n. s., 3-135, are more details of 

 the Brooks object apparent diameter about one-thirtieth of the 

 moon's moon's disk crossed in three or four seconds. The writer, 

 in Science Gossip, says that, on June 27, 1896, at one o'clock in the 

 morning, he was looking at the moon with a 2 -inch achromatic, 

 power 44, when a long black object sailed past, from west to east, 

 the transit occupying 3 or 4 seconds. He believed this object to be 

 a bird there was, however, no fluttering motion observable in it. 



