The Book of the Damned

Over and over has the note of disagreeableness, or of putrefaction, been struck--long duration. Other indications of long duration. I think of a region somewhere above this earth's surface in which gravitation is inoperative and is not governed by the square of the distance--quite as magnetism is negligible at a very short distance from a magnet. Theoretically the attraction of a magnet should decrease with the square of the distance, but the falling-off is found to be almost abrupt at a short distance. I think that things raised from this earth's surface to that region have been held there until shaken down by storms-- The Super-Sargasso Sea. Derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets, things from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of Mars and Jupiter and Neptune; things raised by this earth's cyclones: horses and barns and elephants and flies and dodoes, moas, and pterodactyls; leaves from modern trees and leaves of the Carboniferous era--all, however, tending to disintegrate into homogeneous-looking muds or dusts, red or black or yellow--treasure-troves for the palaeontologists and for the archaeologists--accumulations of centuries--cyclones of Egypt, Greece, and Assyria--fishes dried and hard, there a short time: others there long enough to putrefy-- But the omnipresence of Heterogeneity--or living fishes, also--ponds of fresh water: oceans of salt water. As to the Law of Gravitation, I prefer to take one simple stand: Orthodoxy accepts the correlation and equivalence of forces: Gravitation is one of these forces.