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[p. 182] irreconcilabilities. These turls and these bleats of pedantry--though we insist that, relatively to 1882, these turls and bleats should be regarded as respectfully as we regard rag dolls that keep infants occupied and noiseless--it is the survival of rag dolls into maturity that we object to--so these pious and naive ones who believed that 13,000 times something could have--that is, in quasi-existence--an exact and calculable resultant, whereas there is--in quasi-existence--nothing that can, except by delusion and convenience, be called a unit, in the first place--whose devotions to St. Isaac required blind belief in formulas of falling bodies-- 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 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." | 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. | shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this