The Book of the Damned

Or that around something coming from the intense cold of inter-planetary space--that is of some regions: our own suspicion is that other regions are tropical--the moisture of this earth's atmosphere would condense into a cloud-like appearance around it. In Nature, 20-121, there is an account by Mr. S.W. Clifton, Collector of Customs, at Freemantle, Western Australia, sent to the Melbourne Observatory--a clear day--appearance of a small black cloud, moving not very swiftly--bursting into a ball of fire, of the apparent size of the moon-- Or that something with the velocity of an ordinary meteorite could not collect vapor around it, but that slower-moving objects--speed of a railway train, say--may. The clouds of tornadoes have so often been described as if they were solid objects that I now accept that sometimes they are: that some so-called tornadoes are objects hurtling through this earth's atmosphere, not only generating disturbances by their suctions, but crushing, with their bulk, all things in their way, rising and falling and finally disappearing, demonstrating that gravitation is not the power that the primitives think it is, if an object moving at relatively low velocity be not pulled to this earth, or being so momentarily affected, bounds away. In Finley's Reports on the Character of 600 Tornadoes very suggestive bits of description occur: "Cloud bounded along the earth like a ball"-- Or that it was no meteorological phenomenon, but something very much like a huge solid ball that was bounding along, crushing and carrying with it everything within its field--