The Book of the Damned

If you'd like to have a chemist's opinion, even though it's only a chemist's opinion, see the report of the meeting of the Royal Chemical Society, April 2, 1903. Mr. E.G. Clayton read a paper upon some of the substance that had fallen from the sky, collected by him. The Sahara explanation applies mostly to falls that occur in southern Europe. Farther away, the conventionalists are a little uneasy: for instance, the editor of the Monthly Weather Review, 29-121, says of a red rain that fell near the coast of Newfoundland, early in 1890: "It would be very remarkable if this was Sahara dust." Mr. Clayton said that the matter examined by him was "merely wind-borne dust from the roads and lanes of Wessex." This opinion is typical of all scientific opinion--or theological opinion--or feminine opinion--all very well except for what it disregards. The most charitable thing I can think of--because I think it gives us a broader tone to relieve our malices with occasional charities--is that Mr. Clayton had not heard of the astonishing extent of this fall--had covered the Canary Islands, on the 19th, for instance. I think, myself, that in 1903, we passed through the remains of a powdered world--left over from an ancient inter-planetary dispute, brooding in space like a red resentment ever since. Or, like every other opinion, the notion of dust from Wessex turns into a provincial thing when we look it over. To think is to conceive incompletely, because all thought relates only to the local. We metaphysicians, of course, like to have the notion that we think of the unthinkable.