After the quake of July 15, 1757, upon the sands of Penzance, Cornwall,
in an area of more than 100 square yards, were found marks like hoof
prints, except that they were not crescentic. We feel a similarity, but
note an arbitrary disregard of our own, this time. It seems to us that
marks described as "little cones surrounded by basins of equal diameter"
would be like hoof prints, if hoofs printed complete circles. Other
disregards are that there were black specks on the tops of cones, as if
something, perhaps gaseous, had issued from them; that from one of these
formations came a gush of water as thick as a man's wrist. Of course the
opening of springs is common in earthquakes--but we suspect, myself,
that the Negative Absolute is compelling us to put in this datum and its
disorders.
There's another matter in which the Negative Absolute seems to work
against us. Though to super-chemistry, we have introduced the principle
of celestio-metathesis, we have no good data of exchange of substances
during proximities. The data are all of falls and not of upward
translations. Of course upward impulses are common during earthquakes,
but I haven't a datum upon a tree or a fish or a brick or a man that
ever did go up and stay up and that never did come down again. Our
classic of the horse and barn occurred in what was called a whirlwind.
It is said that, in an earthquake in Calabria, paving stones shot up far
in the air.
The writer doesn't specifically say that they came down again, but
something seems to tell me they did.
The corpses of Riobamba.
Humboldt reported that, in the quake of Riobamba, "bodies were torn
upward from graves"; that "the vertical motion was so strong that bodies
were tossed several hundred feet in the air."
I explain.
I explain that, if in the center of greatest violence of an earthquake,
anything ever has gone up, and has kept on going up, the thoughts of the
nearest observers were very likely upon other subjects.
The quay of Lisbon.
We are told that it went down.
A vast throng of persons ran to the quay for refuge. The city of Lisbon
was in profound darkness. The quay and all the people on it disappeared.
If it and they went down--not a single corpse, not a shred of clothing,
not a plank of the quay, nor so much as a splinter of it ever floated to
the surface.
18
The New Dominant.
I mean "primarily" all that opposes Exclusionism--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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