BOOK OF THE DAMNED 227 



sky, and falls of substances and objects whether commonly called 

 meteoritic or not. 



Not one of these occurrences fits in with principles of primitive, 

 or primary, seismology, and every one of them is a datum of a 

 quaked body passing close to this earth or suspended over it. To 

 the primitives there is not a reason in the world why a convulsion 

 of this earth's surface should be accompanied by unusual sights in 

 the sky, by darkness, or by the fall of substances or objects from 

 the sky. As to phenomena like these, or storms, preceding earth- 

 quakes, the irreconcilability is still greater. 



It was before 1860 that Perrey made his great compilation. We 

 take most of our data from lists compiled long ago. Only the safe 

 and unpainful have been published in recent years at least in 

 ambitious, voluminous form. The restraining hand of the "System" 

 as we call it, whether it has any real existence or not is tight 

 upon the sciences of to-day. The uncanniest aspect of our quasi- 

 existence that I know of is that everything that seems to have one 

 identity has also as high a seeming of everything else. In this one- 

 ness of allness, or continuity, the protecting hand strangles; the 

 parental stifles; love is inseparable from phenomena of hate. There 

 is only Continuity that is in quasi-existence. Nature, at least in 

 its correspondents' columns, still evades this protective strangula- 

 tion, and the Monthly Weather Review is still a rich field of un- 

 faithful observation: but, in looking over other long-established 

 periodicals, I have noted their glimmers of quasi-individuality fade 

 gradually, after about 1860, and the surrender of their attempted 

 identities to a higher attempted organization. Some of them, ex- 

 pressing Intermediateness-wide endeavor to localize the universal, 

 or to localize self, soul, identity, entity or positiveness or realness 

 held out until as far as 1880; traces findable up to 1890 and 

 then, expressing the universal process except that here and there 

 in the world's history there may have been successful approxima- 

 tions to positiveness by "individuals" who only then became in- 

 dividuals and attained to selves or souls of their own surrendered, 

 submitted, became parts of a higher organization's attempt to in- 

 dividualize or systematize into a complete thing, or to localize the 

 universal or the attributes of the universal. After the death of 

 Richard Proctor, whose occasional illiberalities I'd not like to em- 

 phasize too much, all succeeding volumes of Knowledge have 

 yielded scarcely an unconventionality. Note the great number of 

 times that the American Journal of Science and the Report of the 



