Part 59

Wolverhampton, England, June, 1860--violent storm--fall of so many little black pebbles that they were cleared away by shoveling (La Sci. Pour Tous, 5-264); great number of small black stones that fell at Birmingham, England, August, 1858--violent storm--said to be similar to some basalt a few leagues from Birmingham (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1864-37); pebbles described as "common water-worn pebbles" that fell at Palestine, Texas, July 6, 1888--"of a formation not found near Palestine" (W.H. Perry, Sergeant, Signal Corps, Monthly Weather Review, July, 1888); round, smooth pebbles at Kandahor, 1834 (Am. J. Sci., 1-26-161); "a number of stones of peculiar formation and shapes, unknown in this neighborhood, fell in a tornado at Hillsboro, Ill., May 18, 1883." (Monthly Weather Review, May, 1883.)

Pebbles from aerial beaches and terrestrial pebbles as products of whirlwinds, so merge in these instances that, though it's interesting to hear of things of peculiar shape that have fallen from the sky, it seems best to pay little attention here, and to find phenomena of the Super-Sargasso Sea remote from the merger:

To this requirement we have three adaptations:

Pebbles that fell where no whirlwind to which to attribute them could be learned of:

Pebbles which fell in hail so large that incredibly could that hail have been formed in this earth's atmosphere:

Pebbles which fell and were, long afterward, followed by more pebbles, as if from some aerial, stationary source, in the same place. In September, 1898, there was a story in a New York newspaper, of lightning--or an appearance of luminosity?--in Jamaica--something had struck a tree: near the tree were found some small pebbles. It was said that the pebbles had fallen from the sky, with the lightning. But the insult to orthodoxy was that they were not angular fragments such as might have been broken from a stony meteorite: that they were "water-worn pebbles."

In the geographical vagueness of a mainland, the explanation "up from one place and down in another" is always good, and is never overworked, until the instances are massed as they are in this book: but, upon this occasion, in the relatively small area of Jamaica, there was no whirlwind findable--however "there in the first place" bobs up.

Monthly Weather Review, August, 1898-363:

That the government meteorologist had investigated: had reported that a tree had been struck by lightning, and that small water-worn pebbles had been found near the tree: but that similar pebbles could be found all over Jamaica.

Monthly Weather Review, September, 1915-446:

Prof. Fassig gives an account of a fall of hail that occurred in Maryland, June 22, 1915: hailstones the size of baseballs "not at all uncommon."

"An interesting, but unconfirmed, account stated that small pebbles were found at the center of some of the larger hail gathered at Annapolis. The young man who related the story offered to produce the pebbles, but has not done so."

A footnote:

"Since writing this, the author states that he has received some of the pebbles."

When a young man "produces" pebbles, that's as convincing as anything else I've ever heard of, though no more convincing than, if having told of ham sandwiches falling from the sky, he should "produce" ham sandwiches. If this "reluctance" be admitted by us, we correlate it with a datum reported by a Weather Bureau observer, signifying that, whether the pebbles had been somewhere aloft a long time or not, some of the hailstones that fell with them, had been. The datum is that some of these hailstones were composed of from twenty to twenty-five layers alternately of clear ice and snow-ice. In orthodox terms I argue that a fair-sized hailstone falls from the clouds with velocity sufficient to warm it so that it would not take on even one layer of ice. To put on twenty layers of ice, I conceive of something that had not fallen at all, but had rolled somewhere, at a leisurely rate, for a long time.

We now have a commonplace datum that is familiar in two respects:

Little, symmetric objects of metal that fell at Orenburg, Russia, September, 1824 (Phil. Mag., 4-8-463).

A second fall of these objects, at Orenburg, Russia, Jan. 25, 1825 (Quar. Jour. Roy. Inst., 1828-1-447).

I now think of the disk of Tarbes, but when first I came upon these data I was impressed only with recurrence, because the objects of Orenburg were described as crystals of pyrites, or sulphate of iron. I had no notion of metallic objects that might have been shaped or molded by means other than crystallization, until I came to Arago's account of these occurrences (OEuvres, 11-644). Here the analysis gives 70 per cent. red oxide of iron, and sulphur and loss by ignition 5 per cent. It seems to me acceptable that iron with considerably less than 5 per cent. sulphur in it is not iron pyrites--then little, rusty iron objects, shaped by some other means, have fallen, four months apart, at the same place. M. Arago expresses astonishment at this phenomenon of recurrence so familiar to us.

Altogether, I find opening before us, vistas of heresies to which I, for one, must shut my eyes. I have always been in sympathy with the dogmatists and exclusionists: that is plain in our opening lines: that to seem to be is falsely and arbitrarily and dogmatically to exclude. It is only that exclusionists who are good in the nineteenth century are evil in the twentieth century. Constantly we feel a merging away into infinitude; but that this book shall approximate to form, or that our data shall approximate to organization, or that we shall approximate to intelligibility, we have to call ourselves back constantly from wandering off into infinitude. The thing that we do, however, is to make our own outline, or the difference between what we include and what we exclude, vague.

The crux here, and the limit beyond which we may not go--very much--is:

Acceptance that there is a region that we call the Super-Sargasso Sea--not yet fully accepted, but a provisional position that has received a great deal of support--

But is it a part of this earth, and does it revolve with and over this earth--

Or does it flatly overlie this earth, not revolving with and over this earth--

That this earth does not revolve, and is not round, or roundish, at all, but is continuous with the rest of its system, so that, if one could break away from the traditions of the geographers, one might walk and walk, and come to Mars, and then find Mars continuous with Jupiter?

I suppose some day such queries will sound absurd--the thing will be so obvious--

Because it is very difficult for me to conceive of little metallic objects hanging precisely over a small town in Russia, for four months, if revolving, unattached, with a revolving earth--

It may be that something aimed at that town, and then later took another shot.