Until I saw the reproduction of a photograph in the _Scientific
American_, Feb. 21, 1914, I had supposed that these ice-fields must be,
say, at least ten or twenty miles away from this earth, and invisible,
to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so often been
reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photograph published by
the _Scientific American_ is of an aggregation supposed to be clouds,
presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are they. The writer says
that they looked to him like "a field of broken ice." Beneath is a
picture of a conventional field of ice, floating ordinarily in water.
The resemblance between the two pictures is striking--nevertheless, it
seems to me incredible that the first of the photographs could be of an
aerial ice-field, or that gravitation could cease to act at only a mile
or so from this earth's surface--
Unless:
The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.
Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen
miles outward--but that gravitation must be rhythmic.
Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed
quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and
astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the
punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all
the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only
insecure approximations.
We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping arrogance,
to Herbert Spencer's chapters upon the rhythm of all phenomena.
If everything else--light from the stars, heat from the sun, the winds
and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; demands and
supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic reactions and
religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the ticking of clocks;
and arrival and departure of the seasons--if everything else is
variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed and
formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like all other
illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is intermediatism to
accept that, though gravitation may approximate higher to invariability
than do the winds, for instance, it must be somewhere between the
Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here then we are not much
impressed with the opposition of physicists and astronomers, fearing, a
little mournfully, that their language is of expiring sibilations.
So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far
away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be seen in
detail. For description of what I call a "blur," see _Pop. Sci. News_,
February, 1884--sky, in general, unusually clear, but, near the sun, "a
white, slightly curdled haze, which was dazzlingly bright."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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