The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 245 of 376

Page 245 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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Extraordinary-- [p. 200] As to us-- Monstrator. It is recorded that another observer, at Paris, watching the sun, at this time, had not seen this object; But that M. Croste, at Sole, about forty-five German leagues northward from Lausanne, had seen it, describing the same spindle-form, but disagreeing a little as to breadth. Then comes the important point: that he and M. de Rostan did not see it upon the same part of the sun. This, then, is parallax, and, compounded with invisibility at Paris, is great parallax--or that, in the course of a month, in the summer of 1762, a large, opaque, spindle-shaped body traversed the disk of the sun, but at a great distance from the sun. The writer in the Register says: "In a word, we know of nothing to have recourse to, in the heavens, by which to explain this phenomenon." | suppose he was not a hopeless addict to explaining. we fear he must have been a man of loose habits in some other respects. In the Monthly Notices of the R.A.S., February, 1877, Leverrier, who never lost faith, up to the last day, gives the six observations upon an unknown body of planetary size, that he had formulated: Fritsche, Oct. 10, 1802; Stark, Oct. 9, 1819; De Cuppis, Oct. 30, 1839; Sidebotham, Nov. 12, 1849; Lescarbault, March 26, 1859; Lummis, March 20, 1862. If we weren't so accustomed to Science in its essential aspect of Disregard, we'd be mystified and impressed, like the Editor of Nature, with the formulation of these data: agreement of so many instances would seem incredible as a coincidence: but our acceptance is that, with just enough disregard, astronomers and fortune-tellers can formulate anything--or we'd engage, ourselves, to formulate periodicities in the crowds in Broadway--say that every Wednesday morning, a tall man, with one leg and a black eye, carrying a rubber plant, passes the Singer Building, at quarter past ten o'clock.