The Book of the Damned

Vast poised thing, black as a crow, over the moon. Mr. H.C. Russell, who was usually as orthodox as anybody, I suppose--at least, he wrote "F.R.A.S." after his name--tells in the Observatory, 2-374, one of the wickedest, or most preposterous, stories that we have so far exhumed: That he and another astronomer, G.D. Hirst, were in the Blue fountains, near Sydney, N.S.W., and Mr. Hirst was looking at the moon-- He saw on the moon what Russell calls "one of those remarkable facts, which being seen should be recorded, although no explanation can at present be offered." That may be so. It is very rarely done. Our own expression upon evolution by successive dominants and their correlates is against it. On the other hand, we express that every era records a few observations out of harmony with it, but adumbratory or preparatory to the spirit of eras still to come. It's very rarely done. Lashed by the phantom-scourge of a now passing era, the world of astronomers is in a state of terrorism, though of a highly attenuated, modernized, devitalized kind. Let an astronomer see something that is not of the conventional, celestial sights, or something that it is "improper" to see--his very dignity is in danger. Some one of the corralled and scourged may stick a smile into his back. He'll be thought of unkindly. With a hardihood that is unusual in his world of ethereal sensitivenesses, Russell says, of Hirst's observation: "He found a large part of it covered with a dark shade, quite as dark as the shadow of the earth during an eclipse of the moon."