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."

We accept that sometimes fields of ice pass between the sun and the
earth: that many strata of ice, or very thick fields of ice, or
superimposed fields would obscure the sun--that there have been
occasions when the sun was eclipsed by fields of ice:

Flammarion, _The Atmosphere_, p. 394:

That a profound darkness came upon the city of Brussels, June 18, 1839:

There fell flat pieces of ice, an inch long.

Intense darkness at Aitkin, Minn., April 2, 1889: sand and "solid chunks
of ice" reported to have fallen (_Science_, April 19, 1889).

In _Symons' Meteorological Magazine_, 32-172, are outlined rough-edged
but smooth-surfaced pieces of ice that fell at Manassas, Virginia, Aug.
10, 1897. They look as much like the roughly broken fragments of a
smooth sheet of ice--as ever have roughly broken fragments of a smooth
sheet of ice looked. About two inches across, and one inch thick. In
_Cosmos_, 3-116, it is said that, at Rouen, July 5, 1853, fell
irregular-shaped pieces of ice, about the size of a hand, described as
looking as if all had been broken from one enormous block of ice.