The Book of the Damned

But the climax of hardihood or impropriety or wickedness, preposterousness or enlightenment: "One could hardly resist the conviction that it was a shadow, yet it could not be the shadow of any known body." Richard Proctor was a man of some liberality. After a while we shall have a letter, which once upon a time we'd have called delirious--don't know that we could read such a thing now, for the first time, without incredulous laughter--which Mr. Proctor permitted to be published in Knowledge. But a dark, unknown world that could cast a shadow upon a large part of the moon, perhaps extending far beyond the limb of the moon; a shadow as deep as the shadow of this earth-- Too much for Mr. Proctor's politeness. I haven't read what he said, but it seems to have been a little coarse. Russell says that Proctor "freely used" his name in the Echo, of March 14, 1879, ridiculing this observation which had been made by Russell as well as Hirst. If it hadn't been Proctor, it would have been someone else--but one notes that the attack came out in a newspaper. There is no discussion of this remarkable subject, no mention in any other astronomic journal. The disregard was almost complete--but we do note that the columns of the Observatory were open to Russell to answer Proctor. In the answer, I note considerable intermediateness. Far back in 1879, it would have been a beautiful positivism, if Russell had said-- "There was a shadow on the moon. Absolutely it was cast by an unknown body."