Part 28

All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast.

So the fight of the exclusionists to maintain the traditional--or to prevent abrupt transition from the quasi-established--fighting so that here, more than a century after meteorites were included, no other notable inclusion has been made, except that of cosmic dust, data of which Nordenskiold made more nearly real than data in opposition.

So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the preposterous, against Sir W.H. Thomson's notions of arrival upon this earth of organisms on meteorites--

"I can only regard it as a jest" (Knowledge, 1-302).

Or that there is nothing but jest--or something intermediate to jest and tragedy:

That ours is not an existence but an utterance;

That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive--like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist--

That Momus is imagining us and our arts and sciences and religions, and is narrating or picturing us as a satire upon the gods' real existence.

Because--with many of our data of coal that has fallen from the sky as accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific pronouncement that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, by which we mean a consistent existence, or a state in which there is real intelligence, or a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably merge away with imbecility, could there have been such a row as that which was raised about forty years ago over Dr. Hahn's announcement that he had found fossils in meteorites?

Accessible to anybody at that time:

Philosophical Magazine, 4-17-425:

That the substance that fell at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1857, contained organic matter "analagous to fossil waxes."

Or limestone:

Of the block of limestone which was reported to have fallen at Middleburg, Florida, it is said (Science, 11-118) that, though something had been seen to fall in "an old cultivated field," the witnesses who ran to it picked up something that "had been upon the ground in the first place." The writer who tells us this, with the usual exclusion-imagination known as stupidity, but unjustly, because there is no real stupidity, thinks he can think of a good-sized stone that had for many years been in a cultivated field, but that had never been seen before--had never interfered with plowing, for instance. He is earnest and unjarred when he writes that this stone weighs 200 pounds. My own notion, founded upon my own experience in seeing, is that a block of stone weighing 500 pounds might be in one's parlor twenty years, virtually unseen--but not in an old cultivated field, where it interfered with plowing--not anywhere--if it interfered.

Dr. Hahn said that he had found fossils in meteorites. There is a description of the corals, sponges, shells, and crinoids, all of them microscopic, which he photographed, in Popular Science, 20-83.

Dr. Hahn was a well-known scientist. He was better known after that.

Anybody may theorize upon other worlds and conditions upon them that are similar to our own conditions: if his notions be presented undisguisedly as fiction, or only as an "interesting hypothesis," he'll stir up no prude rages.

But Dr. Hahn said definitely that he had found fossils in specified meteorites: also he published photographs of them. His book is in the New York Public Library. In the reproductions every feature of some of the little shells is plainly marked. If they're not shells, neither are things under an oyster-counter. The striations are very plain: one sees even the hinges where bivalves are joined.

Prof. Lawrence Smith (Knowledge, 1-258):

"Dr. Hahn is a kind of half-insane man, whose imagination has run away with him."

Conservation of Continuity.

Then Dr. Weinland examined Dr. Hahn's specimens. He gave his opinion that they are fossils and that they are not crystals of enstatite, as asserted by Prof. Smith, who had never seen them.

The damnation of denial and the damnation of disregard:

After the publication of Dr. Weinland's findings--silence.

The living things that have come down to this earth:

Attempts to preserve the system:

That small frogs and toads, for instance, never have fallen from the sky, but were--"on the ground, in the first place"; or that there have been such falls--"up from one place in a whirlwind, and down in another."

Were there some especially froggy place near Europe, as there is an especially sandy place, the scientific explanation would of course be that all small frogs falling from the sky in Europe come from that center of frogeity.