t think for yourself, or think for myself, all mixed up we must be. A
long time must go by before we can know Florida from Long Island. So
we've had data of fishes that have fallen from our now established and
respectabilized Super-Sargasso Sea--which we've almost forgotten, it's
now so respectable--but we shall have data of fishes that have fallen
during earthquakes. These we accept were dragged down from ponds or
other worlds that have been quaked, when only a few miles away, by this
earth, some other world also quaking this earth.

In a way, or in its principle, our subject is orthodox enough. Only
grant proximity of other worlds--which, however, will not be a matter of
granting, but will be a matter of data--and one conventionally conceives
of their surfaces quaked--even of a whole lake full of fishes being
quaked and dragged down from one of them. The lake full of fishes may
cause a little pain to some minds, but the fall of sand and stones is
pleasantly enough thought of. More scientific persons, or more faithful
hypnotics than we, have taken up this subject, unpainfully, relatively
to the moon. For instance, Perrey has gone over 15,000 records of
earthquakes, and he has correlated many with proximities of the moon, or
has attributed many to the pull of the moon when nearest this earth.
Also there is a paper upon this subject in the _Proc. Roy. Soc. of
Cornwall_, 1845. Or, theoretically, when at its closest to this earth,
the moon quakes the face of this earth, and is itself quaked--but does
not itself fall to this earth. As to showers of matter that may have
come from the moon at such times--one can go over old records and find
what one pleases.

That is what we now shall do.

Our expressions are for acceptance only.

Our data:

We take them from four classes of phenomena that have preceded or
accompanied earthquakes:

Unusual clouds, darkness profound, luminous appearances in the sky, and
falls of substances and objects whether commonly called meteoritic or
not.

Not one of these occurrences fits in with principles of primitive, or
primary, seismology, and every one of them is a datum of a quaked body
passing close to this earth or suspended over it. To the primitives
there is not a reason in the world why a convulsion of this earth's
surface should be accompanied by unusual sights in the sky, by darkness,
or by the fall of substances or objects from the sky. As to phenomena
like these, or storms, prece