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Authors: Charles Fort
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over one small northern parish—
But also of three other discharges, from another far-distant volcano, showing the same precise preference, if not marksmanship, for one small parish in Scotland.
Nor would orthodoxy be any better off in thinking of exploding meteorites and their débris: preciseness and recurrence would be just as difficult to explain.
My own notion is of an island near an oceanic trade-route: it might receive débris from passing vessels seven times in four years.
Other concomitants of black rains:
In Timb’s Year Book, 1851-270, there is an account of “a sort of rumbling, as of wagons, heard for upward of an hour without ceasing,” July 16, 1850, Bulwick Rectory, Northampton, England. On the 19th, a black rain fell.
In Nature, 30-6, a correspondent writes of an intense darkness at Preston, England, April 26, 1884: page 32, another correspondent writes of black rain at Crowle, near Worcester, April 26: that a week later, or May 3, it had fallen again: another account of black rain, upon the 28th of April, near Church Shetton, so intense that the following day brooks were still dyed with it. According to four accounts by correspondents to Nature there were earthquakes in England at this time.
Or the black rain of Canada, Nov. 9, 1819. This time it is orthodoxy to attribute the black precipitate to smoke of forest fires south of the Ohio River—
Zurcher, Meteors, p. 238:
That this black rain was accompanied by “shocks like those of an earthquake.”
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 2-381:
That the earthquake had occurred at the climax of intense darkness and the fall of black rain.
###
Red rains.
Orthodoxy:
Sand blown by the sirocco, from the Sahara to Europe.
Especially in the earthquake regions of Europe, there have been many falls of red substance, usually, but not always, precipitated in rain. Upon many occasions, these substances have been “absolutely identified” as sand from the Sahara. When I first took this matter up, I came across assurance after assurance, so positive to this effect, that, had I not been an Intermediatist, I’d have looked no further. Samples collected from a rain at Genoa—samples of sand forwarded from the Sahara—“absolute agreement” some writers said: same color, same particles of quartz, even the same shells of diatoms mixed in. Then the chemical analyses: not a disagreement worth mentioning.
Our Intermediatist means of expression will be that, with proper exclusions, after the scientific or theological method, anything can be identified with anything else, if all things are only different expressions of an underlying oneness.
To many minds there’s rest and there’s satisfaction in that expression “absolutely identified.” Absoluteness, or the illusion of it—the universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds, that’s assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated, little world, free from contact with cosmic wickednesses, safe from stellar guile, undisturbed by interplanetary prowlings and invasions. The only trouble is that a chemist’s analysis, which seems so final and authoritative to some minds, is no more nearly absolute than is identification by a child or description by an imbecile—
I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is higher—
But that it’s based upon delusion, because there is no definiteness, no homogeneity, no stability, only different stages somewhere between them and indefiniteness, heterogeneity, and instability. There are no chemical elements. It seems acceptable that Ramsay and others have settled that. The chemical elements are only another disappointment in the quest for the positive, as the definite, the homogeneous, and the stable. If there were real elements, there could be a real science of chemistry.
Upon Nov.
But also of three other discharges, from another far-distant volcano, showing the same precise preference, if not marksmanship, for one small parish in Scotland.
Nor would orthodoxy be any better off in thinking of exploding meteorites and their débris: preciseness and recurrence would be just as difficult to explain.
My own notion is of an island near an oceanic trade-route: it might receive débris from passing vessels seven times in four years.
Other concomitants of black rains:
In Timb’s Year Book, 1851-270, there is an account of “a sort of rumbling, as of wagons, heard for upward of an hour without ceasing,” July 16, 1850, Bulwick Rectory, Northampton, England. On the 19th, a black rain fell.
In Nature, 30-6, a correspondent writes of an intense darkness at Preston, England, April 26, 1884: page 32, another correspondent writes of black rain at Crowle, near Worcester, April 26: that a week later, or May 3, it had fallen again: another account of black rain, upon the 28th of April, near Church Shetton, so intense that the following day brooks were still dyed with it. According to four accounts by correspondents to Nature there were earthquakes in England at this time.
Or the black rain of Canada, Nov. 9, 1819. This time it is orthodoxy to attribute the black precipitate to smoke of forest fires south of the Ohio River—
Zurcher, Meteors, p. 238:
That this black rain was accompanied by “shocks like those of an earthquake.”
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 2-381:
That the earthquake had occurred at the climax of intense darkness and the fall of black rain.
###
Red rains.
Orthodoxy:
Sand blown by the sirocco, from the Sahara to Europe.
Especially in the earthquake regions of Europe, there have been many falls of red substance, usually, but not always, precipitated in rain. Upon many occasions, these substances have been “absolutely identified” as sand from the Sahara. When I first took this matter up, I came across assurance after assurance, so positive to this effect, that, had I not been an Intermediatist, I’d have looked no further. Samples collected from a rain at Genoa—samples of sand forwarded from the Sahara—“absolute agreement” some writers said: same color, same particles of quartz, even the same shells of diatoms mixed in. Then the chemical analyses: not a disagreement worth mentioning.
Our Intermediatist means of expression will be that, with proper exclusions, after the scientific or theological method, anything can be identified with anything else, if all things are only different expressions of an underlying oneness.
To many minds there’s rest and there’s satisfaction in that expression “absolutely identified.” Absoluteness, or the illusion of it—the universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds, that’s assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated, little world, free from contact with cosmic wickednesses, safe from stellar guile, undisturbed by interplanetary prowlings and invasions. The only trouble is that a chemist’s analysis, which seems so final and authoritative to some minds, is no more nearly absolute than is identification by a child or description by an imbecile—
I take some of that back: I accept that the approximation is higher—
But that it’s based upon delusion, because there is no definiteness, no homogeneity, no stability, only different stages somewhere between them and indefiniteness, heterogeneity, and instability. There are no chemical elements. It seems acceptable that Ramsay and others have settled that. The chemical elements are only another disappointment in the quest for the positive, as the definite, the homogeneous, and the stable. If there were real elements, there could be a real science of chemistry.
Upon Nov.
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