222 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



smoke from fores fires. Then, in the inconsistency or discord of 

 all quasi-intellection that is striving for consistency or harmony, he 

 tells of the vastness of some of these darknesses. Of course Mr. 

 Plummer did not really think upon this subject, but one does feel 

 that he might have approximated higher to real thinking than by 

 speaking of concentration and then listing data of enormous area, 

 or the opposite of circumstances of concentration because, of his 

 nineteen instances, nine are set down as covering all New England. 

 In quasi-existence, everything generates or is part of its own op- 

 posite. Every attempt at peace prepares the way for war; all 

 attempts at justice result in injustice in some other respect: so Mr. 

 Plummer's attempt to bring order into his data, with the explana- 

 tion of darkness caused by smoke from forest fires, results in such 

 confusion that he ends up by saying that these daytime darknesses 

 have occurred "often with little or no turbidity of the air near the 

 earth's surface" or with no evidence at all of smoke except that 

 there is almost always a forest fire somewhere. 



However, of the eighteen instances, the only one that I'd bother 

 to contest is the profound darkness in Canada and northern parts 

 of the United States, Nov. 19, 1819 which we have already con- 

 sidered. 



Its concomitants: 



Lights in the sky; 



Fall of a black substance; 



Shocks like those of an earthquake. 



In this instance, the only available forest fire was one to the 

 south of the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great 

 fire south of the Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and con- 

 ceivably, by some freak of reflection, light from it might be seen in 

 Montreal, but the earthquake is not assimilable with a forest fire. 

 On the other hand, it will soon be our expression that profound 

 darkness, fall of matter from the sky, lights in the sky, and earth- 

 quakes are phenomena of the near approach of other worlds to this 

 world. It is such comprehensiveness, as contrasted with inclusion of 

 a few factors and disregard for the rest, that we call higher approxi- 

 mation to realness or universalness. 



A darkness, of April 17, 1904, at Wimbledon, England (Symons* 

 Met. Mag., 39-69). It came from a smokeless region: no rain, no 

 thunder; lasted 10 minutes; too dark to go "even out in the open." 



As to darknesses in Great Britain, one thinks of fogs but in 

 Nature, 25-289, there are some observations by Major J. Herschel, 



