{"collection":"fort","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/fort/lo/lo23.htm","path":"fort/lo/lo23.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/fort/lo/lo23.htm","text":"Lo!, by Charles Fort, [1931]\nMelbourne Age, Jan. 21, 1869\u2014there was a carter. He was driving a five-horse truck along the bed of a dry creek. Down the gulley shot a watery fist that was knuckled with boulders. A dead man, a truck, and five horses were punched into trees.\nNew Orleans Daily Picayune, Aug. 6, 1893\u2014a woman in a carriage, crossing a dried-up stream, in Rawlings County, Kansas. It was a quiet, summery scene.\nThere was a rush of water. The carriage crumbled. There was a spill of crumbs that were a woman's hat and the heads of horses.\nPhiladelphia Public Ledger, Sept. 16, 1893\u2014people asleep, in the town of Villacanas, Toledo, Spain. The town was raided by trees. Trees smashed through the walls of houses. People in bed were grabbed by roots. A deluge had fallen into a forest.\nBright, clear day, near Pittsburgh, Pa. From the sky swooped a wrath that incited a river. It was one bulk of water: two miles away, no rain fell (New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 11, 1893). A raging river jeered against former confinements. Some of its gibes were freight cars. It scoffed with bridges. Having made a high-water mark of rebellion, it subsided into a petulance of jostling row-boats. Monistically, I have to accept that no line of demarcation can be drawn between emotions of minds and motions of rivers.\nThese sudden, astonishing leaks from the heavens are not understood. Meteorologists study them meteorologically. This seems logical, and is therefore under suspicion. This is the fallacy of all the sciences: scientists are scientific. They are inorganically scientific. Some day there may be organic science, or the interpretation of all phenomenal things in terms of an organism that comprises all.\nIf our existence is an organism, in which all phenomena are continuous, dreams cannot be utterly different, in the view of continuity, from occurrences that are said to be real. Sometimes, in a nightmare, a kitten turns into a dragon. Louth, Lincolnshire, England, May 29, 1920\u2014the River Lud, which is only a brook, and is known as \"Tennyson's Brook,\" was babbling, or maybe it was purling\u2014\nOut of its play, this little thing humped itself twenty feet high. A ferocious transformation of a brook sprang upon the houses of Louth, and mangled fifty of them. Later in the day, between banks upon which were piled the remains of houses, in which were lying twenty-two bodies, and from which hundreds of the inhabitants had been driven homeless, the little brook was babbling, or purling.\nIn scientific publications, early in the year 1880, an event was told of, in the usual, scientific way: that is, as if it were a thing in itself. It was said that a \"water-spout\" had burst upon the island of St. Kitts, B. W. I. A bulk of water had struck this island, splitting it into cracks, carrying away houses and people, drowning 250 of the inhabitants. A paw of water, clawed with chasms, had grabbed these people.\nIn accordance with our general treatments, we think that there are waterspouts and cloudbursts, but that the waterspout and cloudburst conveniences arise, when nothing else can, or, rather, should, be thought of, and as labels are stuck on events that cannot be so classified except as a matter of scientific decorum and laziness. Some of the sleek, plump sciences are models of good behavior and inactivity, because, with little else to do, they sit all day on the backs of patient fishmongers.\nAs a monist, I think that there is something meteorological about us. Out of the Libraries will come wraths of data, and we, too,\nshall jeer against former confinements. Our gibes will be events, and we shall scoff with catastrophes.\nThe \"waterspout\" at St. Kitts\u2014as if it were a single thing, unrelated to anything else. The West Indian, Feb. 3, 1880\u2014that, while the bulk that was called a waterspout was overwhelming St. Kitts, water was falling upon the island of Grenada, \"as it had never rained before, in the history of the island.\" Grenada is 300 miles from St. Kitts.\nI take data of another occurrence, from the Dominican, and The People, published at Roseau, Dominica, B. W. I. About 11 o'clock, morning of January 4th, the town of Roseau was bumped by midnight. People in the streets were attacked by darkness. People in houses heard the smash of their window panes. Night fell so heavily that it broke roofs. It was a daytime night of falling mud. With the mud came a deluge.\nThe River Roseau rose, and there was a conflict. The river, armed with the detachables of an island, held up shields of mules, and pierced the savage darkness with spears of goats. Long lines of these things it flung through the black streets of Roseau.\nIn the Boiling Lakes District of Dominica, there had been an eruption of mud, at the time of the deluge, which was like the fall of water upon St. Kitts, eight days later. There had, in recorded time, never been an eruption here before.\nThree months before, there had been, in another part of the West Indies, a catastrophe like that of St. Kitts. Upon Oct. 10, 1879, a deluge fell upon the island of Jamaica, and drowned one hundred of the inhabitants (London Times, Nov. 8, 1879). A flood that slid out from this island was surfaced with jungles\u2014tangles of mahogany logs, trees, and bushes; brambled with the horns of goats and cattle; hung with a moss of the fleece of sheep. Incoming vessels plowed furrows, as if in a passing cultivation of one of the rankest luxuriances that ever vegetated upon an ocean. Passengers looked at tangles of trees and bodies, as if at picture puzzles. In foliage, they saw faces.\nFor months, there had been, in the Provinces of Murcia and Alicante, Spain, a drought so severe that inhabitants had been driven into emigration to Algeria. Whether we think of this\ndrought and the prayers of the people as having relation or not, there came a downpour that was as intense as the necessities. See London Times, Oct. 20, 1879. Upon October 10th, floods poured upon these parched provinces. Perhaps it was response to the prayers of the people. Five villages were destroyed. Fifteen hundred persons perished.\nVirtually in the same zone with Spain and the West Indies (U. S. Colombia) a deluge fell, in December. The River Cauca rose beyond all former high water marks, so suddenly that people were trapped in their houses. This was upon December 19th.\nThe next day, the earth started quaking in Salvador, near Lake Ilopanga. This lake was the crater of what was supposed to be an extinct volcano. I take data from the Panama Daily Star and Herald, Feb. 10, 1880.\nUpon the 31st of December\u2014four days before occurrences in the island of Dominica\u2014the earth quaked in Salvador, and from the middle of Lake Ilopanga emerged a rocky formation. Water fell from the sky, in bulks that gouged gullies. Gullies writhed in the quaking ground. The inhabitants who cried to the heavens prayed to Epilepsy. Mud was falling upon the convulsions. A volcanic island was rising in Lake Ilopanga, displacing the water, in streams that writhed from it violently. Rise of a form that filled the lake\u2014it shook out black torrents\u2014head of a Gorgon, shaggy with snakes.\nBeginning upon October 10th, and continuing until the occurrence at St. Kitts, deluge after deluge came down to one zone around this earth\u2014or a flight of lakes was cast from a constellational reservoir, which was revolving and discharging around a zone of this earth. In the minds of most of us, this could not be. We have been taught to look up at the revolving stars, and to see and to think that they do not revolve.\nOur data are of the slaughters of people, who, by fishmongerish explanations, have been held back from an understanding of an irrigational system: of their emotions, and of the elementary emotions of lands. There's a hope in a mind, and it turns to despair\u2014or there's a fertile region in the materials of a South American country\u2014and an unsuspected volcano chars it to a woe of leafless trees. Plains and the promise of crops that are shining in sunlight\nplains crack into disappointments, into which fall expectations. An island appears in the ocean, and after a while young palms feel upward. There's a convulsive relapse, and subliminal filth, from the bottom of the ocean, plasters the little aspirations. Quaking lands have clasped their fields, and have wrung their forests.\nEach catastrophe has been explained by the metaphysical scientists, as a thing in itself. Scientists are contractions of metaphysicians, in their local searches for completeness, and in their statements that, except for infinitesimal errors, plus or minus, completenesses have been found. I can accept that there may be Super-phenomenal Completeness, but not that there can be phenomenal completenesses. It may be that the widespread thought that there is God, or Allness, is only an extension of the deceiving process by which to an explanation of a swarm of lady birds, or to a fall of water at St. Kitts, is given a guise of completeness\u2014or it may be the other way around\u2014or that there is a Wholeness\u2014perhaps one of countless Wholenesses, in the cosmos\u2014and that attempting completenesses and attempting concepts of completenesses are localizing consciousness of an all-inclusive state, or being\u2014so far as its own phenomena are concerned\u2014that is Complete.\nThere have been showers of ponds. From blue skies there have been shafts of water, golden in sunshine. Reflections from stars have fluted sudden, dark, watery columns. There have been violent temples of water\u2014colonnades of shafts, revealed against darkness by lightning\u2014foaming fa\u00e7ades as white as marble. Nights have been caves, roofed with vast, fluent stalactites.\nThese are sprinkles.\nMarch, 1913.\nThe meteorologists study meteorologically. The meteorologists were surprised.\nMarch 23, 1913\u2014250,000 persons driven from their homes\u2014torrents falling, rivers rising, in Ohio. The floods at Dayton, Ohio, were especially disastrous.\nTraffics of bodies, in the watery streets of Dayton. The wind whistles, and holds up a cab. They stop. Night\u2014and the running streets are hustling bodies\u2014but, coming, is worse than the sights\nof former beings, who never got anywhere in life, and are still hurrying. The wreck of a trolley car speeds down an avenue\u2014down a side street rushes a dead man. Let him catch the car, and he'll get about where all his lifetime he got catching other cars. A final dispatch from Dayton\u2014\"Dayton in total darkness.\"\nMarch 23, 24, 25\u2014a watery sky sat on the Adirondack Mountains. It began to slide. It ripped its slants on a peak, and the tops of lamp posts disappeared in the streets of Troy and Albany. Literary event, at Paterson, N. J.\u2014something that was called \"a great cloudburst\" grabbed a factory chimney, and on a ruled page of streets scrawled a messy message. With the guts of horses and other obscenities, it put in popularizing touches. The list of dead, in Columbus, Ohio, would probably reach a thousand. Connecticut River rising rapidly. Delaware River, at Trenton, N. J., 14 feet above normal.\nMarch 26th\u2014in Parkersburg, West Virginia, people who called on their neighbors, rowed boats to second story windows. If they had in their cellars what they have nowadays, there was much demand for divers. New lakes in Vermont, and the State of Indiana was an inland sea. \"Farmers caught napping.\" Surprises everywhere: napping everywhere. Wherever Science was, there was a swipe at a sleep. Floods in Wisconsin, floods and destruction in Illinois and Missouri.\nMarch 27th\u2014see the New York Tribune, of the 28th\u2014that the Weather Bureau was issuing storm warnings.\nThe professional wisemen were not heard from, before this deluge. Some of us would like to know what they had to say, afterward. They said it, in the Monthly Weather Review, April, 1913.\nThe story is told \"completely.\" The story is told, as if there had been exceptional rains, only in Ohio and four neighboring States. Reading this account, one thinks\u2014as one should think\u2014of considerable, or of extraordinary, rain, in one smallish region, and of its derivation from other parts of this earth, where unusual sunshine had brought about unusual evaporations.\nCanada\u2014and it was not here that the sun was shining. Waters falling and freezing, in Canada, loading trees and telegraph wires\nwith ice\u2014power houses flooded, and towns in darkness\u2014crashes of trees, heavy with ice. California was drenched. Torrents falling, in Washington and Oregon. Unprecedented snow in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma\u2014Alabama deluged\u2014floods in Florida.\n\"Ohio and four neighboring States.\"\nDownpours in France and in other parts of Europe.\nSpain\u2014seems that, near Valencia, one of these nights, there was a rotten theatrical performance. Such a fall of big hailstones that a train was stalled\u2014vast tragedian, in a black cloak, posing on the funnel of an engine\u2014car windows that were footlights\u2014and disapproval was expressing with the looks of millions of pigeons\u2019 eggs. Anyway, near Valencia, a fall of hail, three feet deep, stopped trains. Just where was all that sunshine?\nSouth Africa\u2014moving pictures of the low degree of the now old-fashioned \"serials.\" Something staged Clutching Hands. There were watery grabs from the sky, at Colesburg, Murraysburg, and Prieska. The volume of one of these bulks equaled one-tenth of the total rainfall in South Africa, in one year.\nSnow, two months before its season, was falling in the Andes\u2014floods in Paraguay, and people spreading in panics\u2014Government vessels carrying supplies to homeless, starving people\u2014River Uruguay rising rapidly.\nHeavy rains in the Fiji Islands.\nThe rains in Tasmania, during the month of March, were 26 points above the average.\nUpon the first day of the floods in \"Ohio and four neighboring States\" (March 22nd) began a series of terrific thunderstorms in Australia. There was a \"rain blizzard\" in New South Wales. In Queensland, all mails were delayed by floods.\nNew Zealand.\nWellington Evening Post, March 3i\u2014\"The greatest disaster in the history of the Colony!\"\nWhere there had been sluggish rivers, bodies of countless sheep tossed in woolly furies. Maybe there is a vast, old being named God, and reported strands of tossing sheep were glimpses of his whiskers, in one of those wraths of his. In the towns, there were\nfantastic savageries. Wherever the floods had been before, it looks as if they had been to college. One of them rioted through the streets of Gore, having broken down store windows. It roystered with the bodies of animals, wrapped in lace curtains, silks, and ribbons. Down the Matura River sounded a torrent of \"terrible cries.\" It was a rush of drowning cattle. It was a delirium of brandishing horns, upon which invisible collegians were blowing a fanfare.\nThe clip of Paraguay, and the bob of New Zealand: the snip of South Africa, and the shearing of everything else that did not fit in with a theory. Whoever said that the pen is mightier than something else, overlooked the mightiest of all, and that's the scissors.\nWherever all this water was coming from, the full account is of North America and four neighboring Continents.\nPeaches flying from orchards, in the winds of New Zealand\u2014icicles clattering in the streets of Montreal. The dripping palms of Paraguay\u2014and the pine trees of Oregon were mounds of snow. At night this earth was a black constellation, sounding with panics. I can think of the origin of the ocean that fell upon it in not less than constellational terms. Perhaps Orion or Taurus went dry.\nIf a place, say in China, greatly needs water, and if there be stores of water, somewhere else, in one organism, I can think of relations of requital, as I think of need and response in any lesser organism, or suborganism.\nNeed of a camel\u2014and storages\u2014and reliefs.\nHibernating bear\u2014and supplies from his storages.\nAt a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Dec. II, 1922, Sir Francis Younghusband told of a drought, in August, 1906, in Western China. The chief magistrate of Chungking prayed for rain. He put more fervor into it. Then he prayed prodigiously for rain. It began to rain. Then something that was called \"a waterspout\" fell from the sky. Many of the inhabitants were drowned.\nIn the organic sense, I conceive of people and forests and dwindling lakes all expressing a need, and finally compelling an answer. By \"prayers\" I mean utterances by parched mouths, and also the rustlings of dried leaves and grasses. It seems that there have been responses. There are two explanations. One is that it is the mercy\nof God. For an opinion here, see the data. The other is that it is an Organism that is maintaining itself.\nThe British Government has engineered magnificently for water supply in Egypt. It might have been better to plant persuasive trees and clergymen in Egypt. But clergymen are notoriously eloquent, and I think that preferable would be less excitable tipsters to God, who could convey the idea of moderation.\nIn one year the fall of rain, at Norfolk, England, is about 29 inches. In Symons\u2019 Meteorological Magazine, 1889, p. 101, Mr. Symons told of this fall of water of 29 inches in a year, and then told of volumes of water to depths of from 20 to 24 inches that had fallen, from May 25th to the 28th, 1889, in New South Wales, and of a greater deluge-34 inches\u2014that, from the 29th to the 30th, had devastated Hongkong. Mr. Symons called attention to these two bursts from the heavens, thousands of miles apart, saying that they might, or might not, be a coincidence, but that he left it to others to theorize. I point out that a professional meteorologist thought the occurrence of only two deluges, about the same time, but far apart, remarkable, or difficult to explain in terms of terrestrial meteorology.\nIt was left a long time to others.\nHowever, when I was due to appear, I appeared, perhaps right on scheduled time; and I got Australian newspapers. The Sydney newspapers told of the soak in New South Wales. I learned that all the rest of Australia was left to others\u2014or was left, waiting for me to appear, right on scheduled time, most likely. Not rain, but columns of water fell near the town of Avoca, Victoria, and, in the Melbourne Argus, the way of accounting for them was to say that \"a waterspout\" had burst here. There were wide floods in Tasmania. Fields turned to blanks that were then lumpy with rabbits.\nThere had been drought in Australia, and floods were a relief to a necessity, but the greater downpour in China interests us more in conditions in China.\nIt was a time of direst drought and extremest famine in China. Homeward Mail, June 4\u2014that, in some of the more cannibalistic regions, sales of women and children were common. It is said to be almost impossible for anybody to devour his own child. Parents exchanged children.\nDown upon monstrous need came relief that was enormous. At Hongkong, houses collapsed under a smash of alleviation. A fury of mercy tore up almost every street in the Colony. The people had prayed for rain. They got it. Godness so loved Hongkong that in the town's morgue it stretched out sixteen of the inhabitants. At Canton, every pietist proclaimed the efficacy of prayer, and I think he was right about that: but the problem is to tone down all this efficacy. If we will personify what I consider an organism, what he, or more likely she, has not, is any conception of moderation. The rise of the river, at Canton, indicated that up country there had been catastrophic efficacy. At Canton efficacy was so extreme that for months the people were rebuilding.\nShow me a starving man\u2014I pay no attention. Show me the starving man\u2014I can't be bothered. Show me the starving man, on the point of dying\u2014I grab up groceries and I jump on him. I cram bread down his mouth, and stuff his eyes and his ears with potatoes. I rip open his lips to hammer down more food, and bung in his teeth, the better to stuff him. The explanation\u2014it is the god-like in me.\nNow, in a Library, we put in calls for the world's newspapers. Not a hint have we had that there is anything else\u2014nothing in scientific publications of the period\u2014not another word from Mr. Symons\u2014but there is an implement that is mightier than the pen\u2014and we are led on to one of our attempted correlations, by our experiences with it.\nGermany\u2014there was a drought so severe that there were public prayers for rain. Something that was called \"a waterspout\" fell from the sky, and people who did not get all the details went to church about it. Liverpool Echo, May 20\u2014one hundred persons perished.\nAt the same time, there were public rejoicings in Smyrna, where was staged another assuasive tragedy.\nDrought in Russia. Straits Times, June 6\u2014droughts ended by downpours in Bengal and Java. In Kashmir and in the Punjab, violent thunderstorms and earthquakes occurred together (Calcutta Statesman, June 1 and 3). In Turkey, there would have been extremist distress, but about the first of June, amidst woe and thanks-giving,\ndestructive salvations demonstrated efficacy, and for a week kept on spreading joy and misery. Levant Herald, June 4\u2014earthquakes preceded deluges, and then continued with them.\nIn conventional meteorology, no relation between droughts and exceptional rains is admitted. Our data are of widespread droughts and enormous flows of water. There are two little, narrow strips of views on the margins of our moving pictures. On one side\u2014that there is a beneficent God. On the other side\u2014that there isn't anything. And every one of us who has paid any attention to the annals of controversies knows that such oppositions usually give in to an intermediacy. May, 1889\u2014widely this earth was in need\u2014widely waters were coming from somewhere. Now\u2014in Organic terms\u2014I am telling of what seems to me to be Functional Teleportation, or enormous manifestations of that which is sometimes, say in Oklahoma, a little drip over a tree.\nVolcanic eruptions upon this earth, at times of deluges\u2014and maybe, in a land of the stars, there was an eruption, in May, 1889. In France, May 31st, there was one of the singularly lurid sunsets that are known as \"afterglows,\" and that appear after volcanic eruptions. There was no known volcanic eruption upon this earth, from which a discharge could have gone to the sky of France. It may have come from a volcanic eruption somewhere else. All suggestiveness is that it came to this earth over no such distance as millions of miles.\nOther discharges, maybe\u2014red rain coming down from the sky, at Cardiff, Wales (Cardiff Western Mail, May 26). Red dust falling upon the island of Hy\u00e8res, off the coast of France, in the Mediterranean\u2014see the Levant Herald, May 29. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 30\u2014an unknown substance that for several hours had fallen from the sky\u2014crystalline particles, some pink, and some white. Quebec Daily Mercury, May 25\u2014a fine dust that had the appearance of a snowstorm, falling in Dakota.\nMonstrous festivities in Greece\u2014a land that was bedecked with assassinations. Its rivers were garlands\u2014vast twists of vines, budded with the bodies of cattle.\nThe Malay States gulped. The mines of Kamunting were suctions,\ninto which flowed floods (Penang Gazette, May 24). The Bahama Islands were thirsts\u2014drought and loss of crops\u2014then huge swigs from the sky. Other West Indian islands went on Gargantuan sprees\u2014and I'll end up a Prohibitionist. Orgies in Greece, and more or less everywhere else\u2014this earth went drunk on water. I've experimented\u2014try autosuggestion\u2014you can get a pretty fair little souse from any faucet. Tangier\u2014\"great suffering from the drought\"\u2014abundant rains, about June 1st. Drought in British Honduras, and heavy rains upon the 1st and 2nd of June. Tremendous downpours described in the newspaper published upon the island of St. Helena. Earthquake at Jackson, California\u2014the next day a gush from the sky broke down a dam. I'm on a spree, myself\u2014Library attendants wheeling me stacks of this earth's newspapers. Island of Cyprus\u2014a flop from the sky, and the river Pedias went up with a rush from which people at Nicosia narrowly escaped. Torrents in Ceylon. June 4th\u2014a drought of many weeks broken by rains in Cuba. Drought in Mexico\u2014and out of the heavens came a Jack the Ripper. Torn plantations and mutilated cities\u2014rise of the river, at Huezutla\u2014when it subsided the streets were strewn with corpses.\nIn England, Mr. Symons expressed astonishment, because there had been two deluges.\nDeluge and falls of lumps of ice, throughout England. France deluged. Water dropped from the sky, at Lausanne, Switzerland, flooding some of the streets five feet deep. It was not rain. There were falling columns of water from what was thought to be a waterspout. The most striking of the statements is that bulks dropped. One of them was watched. Or some kind of a vast, vaporous cow sailed over a town, and people looked up at her bag of water. Something that was described as \"a large body of water\" was seen at Coburg, Ontario. It crossed the town, holding its bag-like formation. Two miles away, it dropped. It splashed rivers that broke down all dams between Coburg and Lake Ontario. In the Toronto Globe, June 3, this falling bulk is called \"a waterspout.\" Fall of a similar bulk, in Switzerland\u2014crops and houses and bridges mixing down a valley, at Sargans. Fall of a bulk, at Reichenbach, Saxony. \"It was a waterspout\" (London Times, June 6).\nThis time the fishmonger is a waterspout.\nSpain pounded by falling waters: Madrid flooded: many buildings damaged by a violent hailstorm. Deluges in China continuing. Deluges in Australia continuing. Floods in Argentina: people of Ayacuchio driven from their homes: sudden rise of the river, at Buenos Aires. In the South American Journal of this period are accounts of tremendous downpours and devastations in Brazil and Uruguay.\nOne of these bodies of water that were not rain fell at Chetnole, Dorsetshire, England. The people, hearing crashes, looked up at a hill, and saw it frilled with billows. Watery ruffs, from eight to ten feet high, heaved on the hill. The village was tossed in a surf. \"The cause of this remarkable occurrence was for some time unknown but it has now been ascertained that a waterspout burst on Batcombe Hill.\" So wrote Mr. Symons, in whose brains there was no more consciousness of all that was going on in the world about him than there was in any other pair of scissors.\nIt was not ascertained that a waterspout had burst on Batcombe Hill. No waterspout was seen. What was ascertained was that columns of water of unknown origin had fallen high on the Hill, gouging holes, some of them eight or nine feet deep. Though Mr. Symons gave the waterspout-explanation, it did occur to him to note that there was no statement that the water was salty\u2014\nThese bulks of water, and their pendent columns\u2014that they were waterspouts\u2014\nOr that Slaughter had lain with Life, and that murderous mothers had slung off their udders, from which this earth drank through teats that were cataracts.\nWherever the deluges were coming from, I note that, as with phenomena of March, 1913, unseasonable snow fell. Here it was about the first of June, and snow was falling in Michigan. The suggestion is that this was not a crystallization in the summer sky of Michigan, but an effect of the intenser coldness of outer regions, upon water that had come to this earth from storages on a planet, or from a reservoir in Starland. Note back to mention of falls of lumps of ice in England.\nWherever the deluges were coming from, meteors, too, were coming. If we can think that falls of water and falls of meteors were related, we have reinforcement to our expression that water was coming to this needful earth from somewhere else. Five remarkable meteors are told of, in the Monthly Weather Review. In the New York Sun, May 30, is an account of a meteor that exploded in the sky of Putnam County, Florida, and was heard 15 miles around. In Madras, India, where the drought was \"very grave,\" an extraordinary meteor was seen, night of June 4th (Madras Mail, June 26). In South Africa, where the drought was so extreme that a herd of buffaloes had been driven to a pool within five miles of the town of Uitenhage, a meteor exploded, with detonations that were heard in a line 40 miles long (Cape Argus, May 28). May 22nd\u2014great, detonating meteor, at Otranto, Italy. The meteor that was seen in England and Ireland, May 29th, is told of in Nature, 40-174. For records of three other great meteors, see Nature and Cosmos. There was a spectacular occurrence at Dunedin, New Zealand, early in the morning of May 27th (Otago Witness, June 6). Rumbling sounds\u2014a shock\u2014illumination of the sky\u2014exploding meteor.\nIn some parts of the United States, there had been extreme need for water. In the New Orleans Daily Picayune are accounts of the \"gloomy outlook for crops\" in six of the Southern States. About twenty reports upon this drought were published in the Monthly Weather Review.\nRushes of violent mercies\u2014they flooded the south and smashed the north\u2014crash of a dam, at Littleton, New Hampshire\u2014busted dam near Laurel, Pa.\u2014\nMay, 1889\u2014and Science and Religion\u2014\nIt is my expression that the two outstanding blessings, benefits, or \"gifts of God\" to humanity, are Science and Religion. I deduce this\u2014or that the annals of both are such trails of slaughter, deception, exploitation, and hypocrisy that they must be of enormous good to balance with their appalling evils\u2014\nOr the craze of medical science for the vermiform appendix. That played out. Now everybody who can pay for it is losing his tonsils. Newspaper headings\u2014\"Family of eight relieved of their\ntonsils\"\u2014\"Save your pets\u2014dogs and cats endangered by their tonsils.\"\nConcentrate in one place this bloody fad, or scientific \"racket,\" and there would be a fury like that at Andover, N. Y., in May, 1889\u2014\nA bulk of water, foaming as white as a surgeon\u2014it jabbed a bolt of lightning into Andover. It operated upon farms, and cut off their inhabitants. Trained clouds stood around, and handed out more bolts of lightning. A dam broke, and a township writhed upon its field of operations. Another dam broke\u2014but the operations were successes, and, if there was much destruction, that was because of a complication of other causes.\nMay 31st\u2014Johnstown, Pa.\u2014\nIf I can't think of massacre apart from devotions, I think that a lake ran mad with religious mania. It rushed down a valley, and, if I'm right about this, it bore on its crest, the most appalling of all symbols\u2014the mast of a ship that was crossed by a telegraph pole. In a pogrom against houses, it clubbed out their occupants, with bridges. It impaled homes upon the steeples of churches. Its watery Cossacks, mounted on billows, flogged factories. And then, along the slopes of the Conemaugh Valley, it told its beads with strings of corpses.\nEarthwide droughts\u2014prayers to many gods\u2014something vouchsafed catastrophes\u2014\nThat from somewhere else in existence, vast volumes of water were sent to this arid earth, or were organically teleported\u2014\nOr that, by coincidence, and unseen, waterspout after waterspout rose from the Atlantic, and rose from the Pacific: from the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean, and from the Mediterranean; from the Gulf of Mexico, the English Channel, Lake Ontario\u2014or that such an extension of such fishmongering is a brutalization of conveniences\u2014\nOr that from somewhere in a starry shell that is not enormously far away from this earth, more than a Mississippi streamed to this needful earth, and forked the disasters of its beneficence from Australia to Canada.\n15,000 persons were drowned at Johnstown. Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1889\u2014\"The people of Johnstown have lost all faith in Providence. Many have thrown away their Bibles, and since the disaster have openly burned them.\"\nBy the providential, I mean the organically provided for.\nBy God, I mean an automatic Jehovah.","title":"Lo!: Part II: 23","type":"page"}