the
inconsistency or discord of all quasi-intellection that is striving for
consistency or harmony, he tells of the vastness of some of these
darknesses. Of course Mr. Plummer did not really think upon this
subject, but one does feel that he might have approximated higher to
real thinking than by speaking of concentration and then listing data of
enormous area, or the opposite of circumstances of concentration--because,
of his nineteen instances, nine are set down as covering all New England.
In quasi-existence, everything generates or is part of its own opposite.
Every attempt at peace prepares the way for war; all attempts at justice
result in injustice in some other respect: so Mr. Plummer's attempt to
bring order into his data, with the explanation of darkness caused by
smoke from forest fires, results in such confusion that he ends up by
saying that these daytime darknesses have occurred "often with little
or no turbidity of the air near the earth's surface"--or with no evidence
at all of smoke--except that there is almost always a forest fire
somewhere.

However, of the eighteen instances, the only one that I'd bother to
contest is the profound darkness in Canada and northern parts of the
United States, Nov. 19, 1819--which we have already considered.

Its concomitants:

Lights in the sky;

Fall of a black substance;

Shocks like those of an earthquake.

In this instance, the only available forest fire was one to the south of
the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great fire south of the
Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and conceivably, by some freak of
reflection, light from it might be seen in Montreal, but the earthquake
is not assimilable with a forest fire. On the other hand, it will soon
be our expression that profound darkness, fall of matter from the sky,
lights in the sky, and earthquakes are phenomena of the near approach of
other worlds to this world. It is such comprehensiveness, as contrasted
with inclusion of a few factors and disregard for the rest, that we call
higher approximation to realness--or universalness.

A darkness, of April 17, 1904, at Wimbledon, England (_Symons' Met.
Mag._, 39-69). It came from a smokeless region: no rain, no thunder;
lasted 10 minutes; too dark to go "even out in the open."

As to darknesses in Great Britain, one thinks of fogs--but in _Nature_,
25-289, there are some observations by Major J. Herschel, upon an
obscuration in London, Jan. 22, 1