294 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



about, by addition, disregard and distortion. For instance, the 

 "dead calm in a single day." If I had found that the excitement 

 did die out rather soon, I'd incline to accept that nothing ex- 

 traordinary had occurred. 



I found that the excitement had continued for weeks. 



I recognize this as a well-adapted thing to say, to divert atten- 

 tion from a discorrelate. 



All phenomena are "explained" in the terms of the Dominant of 

 their era. This is why we give up trying really to explain, and 

 content ourselves with expressing. Devils that might print marks 

 in snow are correlates to the third Dominant back from this era 

 So it was an adjustment by nineteenth-century correlates, or hu- 

 man tropisms, to say that the marks in the snow were clawed. Hoof- 

 like marks are not only horsey but devilish. It had to be said in 

 the nineteenth century that those prints showed claw-marks. We 

 shall see that this was stated by Prof. Owen, one of the greatest 

 biologists of his day except that Darwin didn't think so. But 

 I shall give reference to two representations of them that can be 

 seen in the New York Public Library. In neither representation 

 is there the faintest suggestion of a claw-mark. There never has 

 been a Prof. Owen who has explained: he has correlated. 



Another adaptation, in the later accounts, is that of leading 

 this discorrelate to the Old Dominant into the familiar scenery 

 of a fairy story, and discredit it by assimilation to the conven- 

 tionally fictitious so the idea of the baying, terrified hounds, and 

 forest like enchanted forests, which no one dared to enter. Hunting 

 parties were organized, but the baying, terrified hounds do not ap- 

 pear in contemporaneous accounts. 



The story of the kangaroo looks like adaptation to needs for 

 an animal that could spring far, because marks were found in the 

 snow on roofs of houses. But so astonishing is the extent of snow 

 that was marked that after a while another kangaroo was added. 



But the marks were in single lines. 



My own acceptance is that not less than a thousand one-legged 

 kangaroos, each shod with a very small horseshoe could have marked 

 that snow of Devonshire. 



London Times, Feb. 16, 1855: 



"Considerable sensation has been caused in the towns of Tops- 

 ham, Lymphstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish, in Devon- 

 shire, in consequence of the discovery of a vast number of foot 

 tracks of a most strange and mysterious description." 



