, myself. And every formal design depends upon blanks, as much as upon occupied spaces. But my objection to such a pattern-maker as Dr. Davison is to the preponderance of what he leaves out. In Dr. Davison's 36 pages upon the lesser catastrophe, at Charleston, he spins thin lines of argument, in a pretty pattern of agreements, around omissions. It is his convention that all earthquakes are of local, subterranean origin -- so he leaves out all appearances in the sky, and mentions none of the other violences that disturbed a zone around this earth. It is a monstrous disproportion, when a mind that should be designing embroidery takes catastrophes for the lines and blanks of its compositions.
It is my expression that if a clipper of data should mislay his scissors, or should accidentally let in an account of one of the many localized repetitions of meteors, he would tell of an indication that this earth is, or almost is, stationary. Night of Oct. 20th -- meteors falling at Srinagar, Kashmir. There was an earthquake. Shocks and falls of meteors continued together. According to my searches in Indian newspapers, these repeating meteors were seen nowhere else. As to zone-phenomena, I point out that there is a difference of only one degree of latitude between Charleston and Srinagar. For the data, see the Times of India, Nov. 5.
If a string of meteors should be flying toward this earth, and if the first of them should fall to this earth, at Srinagar, how is anybody going to think of the rest of them falling exactly here, if this earth is speeding away from them? Sometimes I am almost inclined to have a little faith, of course not in general reasoning, but anyway in my own reasoning, and I go on to observe that a long string of meteors can be thought [347/348] of, as coming down to the one point where the first fell, if that point is not moving away from them. But I begin to suspect that the trouble with me is that I am simple-minded, and that mine enemies, whom I call "conventionalists," are more subtle than I am, and prefer their views, because mine are so obvious. Of course this earth is stationary, in a surrounding of revolving stars so far from far away than an expedition could sail to them. But no dialectician, of any fastidiousness, would be attracted by a subject so easy to maintain.
Back to data -- geysers spouted from the ground, at Charleston, and there were sulphurous emissions. The ground was incipiently volcanic and charged electrically.
Meteors and smoky discharges and glares and fall of ashes and enormous pours of water, as if from a volcano that was moving around a zone of this earth --
And there is no knowing when, in the year 1886, disturbances began in the Andromeda nebula.
In the Observatory, 9-402, it is said that, upon Sept. 26th, a new star in the Andromeda nebula had been reported by one astronomer, but that, according to another astronomer, there was no such new star.(39) Astronomical Register, 1886-269 -- that, upon Oct. 3rd, a new star in this nebula had been photographed.(40)
I think of our existence as a battery -- an enormous battery, or, in the cosmic sense, a little battery. So I think of volcanic regions, or incipiently volcanic regions, in a land of the stars and in a land of this earth, as electrodes, which are mutually perturbative, and between which flow quantities of water and other volcanic discharges, in electrolytic, or electrically teleportative, currents. According to data, I think that some teleportations are instantaneous, and that some are slow drifts. To illustrate what I mean by stimulation, most [348/349] likely electric, by interacting volcanoes, and transportation, or electric teleportation, of matter, between mutually effective volcanoes, I shall report a conversation, which, unlike mere human dialogue, was seen, as well as heard.
Upon the evening of Sept. 3rd, 1902, at Martinique, where the volcano Mont Pelée humps high, Prof. Angelo Heilprin, as he tells in his book, Mont Pelée, saw southward, at sea, electric flashes.(41) They were in the direction of La Soufrière, the volca