ng to the _La Crosse Daily Republican_, of March 20, 1886,
darkness suddenly settled upon the city of Oshkosh, Wis., at 3 P.M.,
March 19. In five minutes the darkness equaled that of midnight.

Consternation.

I think that some of us are likely to overdo our own superiority and the
absurd fears of the Middle Ages--

Oshkosh.

People in the streets rushing in all directions--horses running
away--women and children running into cellars--little modern touch after
all: gas meters instead of images and relics of saints.

This darkness, which lasted from eight to ten minutes, occurred in a day
that had been "light but cloudy." It passed from west to east, and
brightness followed: then came reports from towns to the west of
Oshkosh: that the same phenomenon had already occurred there. A "wave of
total darkness" had passed from west to east.

Other instances are recorded in the _Monthly Weather Review_, but, as to
all of them, we have a sense of being pretty well-eclipsed, ourselves,
by the conventional explanation that the obscuring body was only a very
dense mass of clouds. But some of the instances are interesting--intense
darkness at Memphis, Tenn., for about fifteen minutes, at 10 A.M., Dec.
2, 1904--"We are told that in some quarters a panic prevailed, and that
some were shouting and praying and imagining that the end of the world
had come." (_M.W.R._, 32-522.) At Louisville, Ky., March 7, 1911, at
about 8 A.M.: duration about half an hour; had been raining moderately,
and then hail had fallen. "The intense blackness and general ominous
appearance of the storm spread terror throughout the city." (_M.W.R._,
39-345.)

However, this merger between possible eclipses by unknown dark bodies
and commonplace terrestrial phenomena is formidable.

As to darknesses that have fallen upon vast areas, conventionality
is--smoke from forest fires. In the _U.S. Forest Service Bulletin_, No.
117, F.G. Plummer gives a list of eighteen darknesses that have occurred
in the United States and Canada. He is one of the primitives, but I
should say that his dogmatism is shaken by vibrations from the new
Dominant. His difficulty, which he acknowledges, but which he would have
disregarded had he written a decade or so earlier, is the profundity of
some of these obscurations. He says that mere smokiness cannot account
for such "awe-inspiring dark days." So he conceives of eddies in the
air, concentrating the smoke from forest fires. Then, in