the footprints of an
ox--supposed that the devil did it. (_Notes and Queries_, 9-6-225.)

16.

Angels.

Hordes upon hordes of them.

Beings massed like the clouds of souls, or the commingling whiffs of
spirituality, or the exhalations of souls that Dore pictured so often.

It may be that the Milky Way is a composition of stiff, frozen,
finally-static, absolute angels. We shall have data of little Milky
Ways, moving swiftly; or data of hosts of angels, not absolute, or still
dynamic. I suspect, myself, that the fixed stars are really fixed, and
that the minute motions said to have been detected in them are
illusions. I think that the fixed stars are absolutes. Their twinkling
is only the interpretation by an intermediatist state of them. I think
that soon after Leverrier died, a new fixed star was discovered--that,
if Dr. Gray had stuck to his story of the thousands of fishes from one
pail of water, had written upon it, lectured upon it, taken to street
corners, to convince the world that, whether conceivable or not, his
explanation was the only true explanation: had thought of nothing but
this last thing at night and first thing in the morning--his
obituary--another "nova" reported in _Monthly Notices_.

I think that Milky Ways, of an inferior, or dynamic, order, have often
been seen by astronomers. Of course it may be that the phenomena that we
shall now consider are not angels at all. We are simply feeling around,
trying to find out what we can accept. Some of our data indicate hosts
of rotund and complacent tourists in inter-planetary space--but then
data of long, lean, hungry ones. I think that there are, out in
inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of
celestial ravagers--which have come here and pounced upon civilizations
of the past, cleaning them up all but their bones, or temples and
monuments--for which later historians have invented exclusionist
histories. But if something now has a legal right to us, and can
enforce its proprietorship, they've been warned off. It's the way of all
exploitation. I should say that we're now under cultivation: that we're
conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our
own nobler and higher instincts.

Against these notions is the same sense of finality that opposes all
advance. It's why we rate acceptance as a better adaptation than belief.
Opposing us is the strong belief that, as to inter-planetary phenomena,
virtua