"And make no mistake! These beings, who may be infinitely beyond us in intelligence and science, and who are undoubtedly completely different from us in every respect, care naught for the wreck and ruin they may be causing with their trawls. Any terror they might loose upon us would mean nothing to them. For to them, high above, we at the air-ocean's bottom are no more than the blind, strange creatures that we fish from our own watery seas' depths are to us." It seems unnecessary to describe the turmoil that was aroused by this startling statement of Dr. Howard's. It is hard to expose the wilful blindness of a world that now looks back upon that blindness with something like terror. Dr. Howard's theory became the target of every form and degree of criticism during the ensuing days. His idea was susceptible to ridicule, and the scientists whose meteor-theory he had questioned seized the opportunity. _Did_ we live at the bottom of an ocean, an atmospheric sea? _Were_ we merely crawling things upon earth's surface, to be fished for and examined curiously by unimaginable beings and vessels far above? The idea was too humorous. The public's indignation dissolved into laughter. The Third A very conceivable fact was brought forward to demolish the "ridiculous" theory. If space-ships were passing to and fro constantly outside our atmosphere, why had they never been glimpsed by astronomers? Dr. Howard replied promptly to this by giving a list of unknown objects sighted by astronomers in space in the last decades, by Sporer and Wartman and Grek and Ferguson and Loomis, and scores upon scores of others, objects seen against the sun or moon or planets, and which had never been identified. There was no more criticism on that score, but a side-issue was raised. Dr. Howard had stated that the atmospheric sea of earth had in all probability a surface as definite as that of an ocean. Many attacked this minor point, but were met by Dr. Howard with the cold data of many tests, showing that while for a certain distance the air becomes rarer with increased altitude, it seems thereafter to remain constant, indicating that from that point up to its definite end or surface its density is the same. There was no valid reason why an ocean of air should not have as definite a surface as an ocean of water. Each new critical attack brought forward in those few days met with much the same treatment and the criticism on the part of Dr. Howard's enemies began to change into bad temper and abuse. I mentioned this to him on the night of July 5th, showing him an account of the latest attack. From my first reading of his hypothesis, it had seemed to me crystal-clear in truth, but conventional scientists had found its startling presumptions upsetting. "They wouldn't believe it, some of them, if they themselves were picked up by a trawl from above and whirled around the earth," I said.