216 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



corraled and scourged may stick a smile into his back. He'll be 

 thought of unkindly. 



With a hardihood that is unusual in his world of ethereal sensi- 

 tivenesses, Russell says, of Hirst's observation: 



"He found a large part of it covered with a dark shade, quite as 

 dark as the shadow of the earth during an eclipse of the moon." 



But the climax of hardihood or impropriety or wickedness, pre- 

 posterousness or enlightenment: 



"One could hardly resist the conviction that it was a shadow, yet 

 it eould not be the shadow of any known body." 



Richard Proctor was a man of some liberality. After a while we 

 shall have a letter, which once upon a time we'd have called de- 

 lirious don't know that we could read such a thing now, for the 

 first time, without incredulous laughter which Mr. Proctor per- 

 mitted to be published in Knowledge. But a dark, unknown world 

 that could cast a shadow upon a large part of the moon, perhaps 

 extending far beyond the limb of the moon; a shadow as deep as 

 the shadow of this earth 



Too much for Mr. Proctor's politeness. 



I haven't read what he said, but it seems to have been a little 

 coarse. Russell says that Proctor "freely used" his name in the 

 Echo, of March 14, 1879, ridiculing this observation which had 

 been made by Russell as well as Hirst. If it hadn't been Proctor, 

 it would have been some one else but one notes that the attack 

 came out in a newspaper. There is no discussion of this remarkable 

 subject, no mention in any other astronomic journal. The disregard 

 was almost complete but we do note that the columns of the 

 Observatory were open to Russell to answer Proctor. 



In the answer, I note considerable intermediateness. Far back 

 in 1879, it would have been a beautiful positivism, if Russell had 

 said 



"There was a shadow on the moon. Absolutely it was cast by an 

 unknown body." 



According to our religion, if he had then given all his time to the 

 maintaining of this one stand, of course breaking all friendships, all 

 ties with his fellow astronomers, his apotheosis would have occurred, 

 greatly assisted by means well known to quasi-existence when its 

 compromises and evasions, and phenomena that are partly this and 

 partly that, are flouted by the definite and uncompromising. It 

 would be impossible in a real existence, but Mr. Russell, of quasi- 

 existence, says that he did resist the conviction; that he had said 



