That,
I think, was an aerial iceberg. In the awful density, or almost absolute
stupidity of the 19th century, it never occurred to anybody to look for
traces of polar bears or of seals upon these fragments.

Of course, seeing what we want to see, having been able to gather these
data only because they are in agreement with notions formed in advance,
we are not so respectful to our own notions as to a similar impression
forced upon an observer who had no theory or acceptance to support. In
general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this
should not be taken as an absolute.

_Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1894:

That, from the Weather Bureau, of Portland, Oregon, a tornado, of June
3, 1894, was reported.

Fragments of ice fell from the sky.

They averaged three to four inches square, and about an inch thick. In
length and breadth they had the smooth surfaces required by our
acceptance: and, according to the writer in the _Review_, "gave the
impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and
suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the "damned," or before
we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried condemnation by
infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied--but without comment--in the
_Scientific American_, 71-371.

Our theology is something like this:

Of course we ought to be damned--but we revolt against adjudication by
infants, turtles, and lambs.

We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult department of
super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There's a lesson to me in
the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our opposition is in the
clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the
imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become
the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a
few miles above this earth--then the shining of the sun, and the ice
partly melting--that note upon the ice that fell at Derby--water
trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I
seemed to look up and so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like
stalactites from a flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at
the under side of an aerial ice-lump, and seemed to see a papillation
similar to that observed by a calf at times. But then--but then--if
icicles should form upon the under side of a sheet