You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
An extraordinary book! There's no doubt of that. But just in what way it's extraordinary, that's the question.
The first chapter arrests the attention both by its style and by its matter. It proposes to discuss various data that science has excluded, these are the damned. Then comes a figurative enumeration of the damned as they pass in processional which reminds one of the Dance of Death. The program is a captivating one. The author then goes on by way of denning the attitude he is going to take toward the damned, to state his philosophy, in a very imperious way as if he were offering something quite new and of inestimable value. He tells us for example that “nothing has ever been finally found out because there is nothing final to find out.”
Now, what are the data excluded by science which he discusses? They are, among others, falls of animal matter upon the earth, red rains, black snow, falls of sulphur, coal, resinous substance from the sky, falls of tadpoles, toads, frogs, fish, insects, worms, blood. He discusses these, and in addition astronomy, eclipses, science in general. But how? For example, he disposes of Darwinism. Darwinism is the survival of the survivors. He talks of a super-Sargasso Sea, super-tropical regions, super-geography, super-sociology, super-Niagaras, and ultra-Missis-sippis, the super-mercantile, super-piratic, super-evangelical. Ice falls to the earth from the super-Arctic regions; pebbles fall to earth from the beaches and floating islands of the super-Sargasso Sea. He speaks of inter-planetary wrecks, and apropos of a red shower says that something, far from the earth had bled—super-dragon that had rammed a comet.
Some of the book is interesting and we find ourselves in agreement with certain of his tendencies when for example he rails against smug conventionalism. When, however, he offers as an explanation of the finding of a crystal lens that it had been dropped by “some one a million miles or so up in the air” we ask—Is it a joke?
Howev