n, they may, without direction
like human direction, adjust to one another in the way of vortex rings
of smoke--a very human-like way, that is. But in _Knowledge_, February,
1894, are two photographs of Brooks' comet that are shown as evidence of
its seeming collision with a dark object, October, 1893. Our own wording
is that it "struck against something": Prof. Barnard's is that it had
"entered some dense medium, which shattered it." For all I know it had
knocked against merely a field of ice.

Melanicus.

That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over
other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or
wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to
tip--a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which
makes us useful.

He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black,
brooding vampire.

_Science_, July 31, 1896:

That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W.R. Brooks, director of the
Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object pass rather slowly
across the moon, in a horizontal direction. In Mr. Brooks' opinion it
was a dark meteor. In _Science_, Sept. 14, 1896, a correspondent writes
that, in his opinion, it may have been a bird. We shall have no trouble
with the meteor and bird mergers, if we have observations of long
duration and estimates of size up to hundreds of miles. As to the body
that was seen by Brooks, there is a note from the Dutch astronomer,
Muller, in the _Scientific American_, 75-251, that, upon April 4, 1892,
he had seen a similar phenomenon. In _Science Gossip_, n.s., 3-135, are
more details of the Brooks object--apparent diameter about one-thirtieth
of the moon's--moon's disk crossed in three or four seconds. The writer,
in _Science Gossip_, says that, on June 27, 1896, at one o'clock in the
morning, he was looking at the moon with a 2-inch achromatic, power 44,
when a long black object sailed past, from west to east, the transit
occupying 3 or 4 seconds. He believed this object to be a bird--there
was, however, no fluttering motion observable in it.

In the _Astronomische Nachrichten_, No. 3477, Dr. Brendel, of
Griefswald, Pomerania, writes that Postmaster Ziegler and other
observers had seen a body about 6 feet in diameter crossing the sun's
disk. The duration here indicates something far from the earth, and also
far from the sun. This thing was seen a quarter of an hour before it