Against data that were piling up, in their own time, of slow-falling meteorites; "milk warm" ones admitted even by Farrington and Merrill; at least one icy meteorite nowhere denied by the present orthodoxy, a datum as accessible to Thomson, in 1882, as it is now to us, because it was an occurrence of 1860. Beans and needles and tacks and a magnet. Needles and tacks adhere to and systematize relatively to a magnet, but, if some beans, too, be caught up, they are irreconcilables to this system and drop right out of it. A member of the Salvation Army may hear over and over data that seem so memorable to an evolutionist. It seems remarkable that they do not influence him—one finds that he cannot remember them. It is incredible that Sir William Thomson had never heard of slow-falling, cold meteorites. It is simply that he had no power to remember such irreconcilabilities.
And then Mr. Symons again. Mr. Symons was a man who probably did more for the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time: therefore he probably did more to hold back the science of meteorology than did any other man of his time. In Nature, 41-135, Mr. Symons says that Prof. Schwedoff's ideas are "very droll."
I think that even more amusing is our own acceptance that, not very far above this earth's surface, is a region that will be the subject of a whole new science—super-geography—with which we shall immortalize ourselves in the resentments of the schoolboys of the future—
Pebbles and fragments of meteors and things from Mars and Jupiter and Azuria: wedges, delayed messages, cannon balls, bricks, nails, coal and coke and charcoal and offensive old cargoes—things that coat in ice in some regions and things that get into areas so warm that they putrefy—or that there are all the climates of geography in super-geography. I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there often are fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic Ocean—volumes of water in which are many fishes and frogs—tracts of land covered with caterpillars—
Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds—and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages. Sometime I shall write a guide book to the Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators, but just at present there wouldn't be much call for it.
We now have more of our expression upon hail as a concomitant, or more data of things that have fallen from the sky, with hail.
In general, the expression is:
These things may have been raised from some other part of the earth's surface, in whirlwinds, or may not have fallen, and may have been upon the ground, in the first place—but were the hailstones found with them, raised from some other part of the earth's surface, or were the hailstones upon the ground, in the first place?
As I said before, this expression is meaningless as to a few instances; it is reasonable to think of some coincidence between the fall of hail and the fall of other things: but, inasmuch as there have been a good many instances,—we begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences. If not conceivably could very large hailstones and lumps of ice form in this earth's atmosphere, and so then had to come from external regions, then other things in or accompanying very large hailstones and lumps of ice came from external regions—which worries us a little: we may be instantly translated to the Positive Absolute.
Cosmos, 13-120, quotes a Virginia newspaper, that fishes said to have been catfishes, a foot long, some of them, had fallen, in 1853, at Norfolk, Virginia, with hail.