balloon that had escaped from
Paris in July. He tells of a balloon that fell in Chicago, September 17,
or three weeks later than the Bermuda object.

It's one incredibility against another, with disregards and convictions
governed by whichever of the two Dominants looms stronger in each
reader's mind. That he can't think for himself any more than I can is
understood.

My own correlates:

I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by
super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful when I think that we
may be of some use after all. I think that dragnets have often come down
and have been mistaken for whirlwinds and waterspouts. Some accounts of
seeming structure in whirlwinds and waterspouts are astonishing. And I
have data that, in this book, I can't take up at all--mysterious
disappearances. I think we're fished for. But this is a little
expression on the side: relates to trespassers; has nothing to do with
the subject that I shall take up at some other time--or our use to some
other mode of seeming that has a legal right to us.

_Nature_, 33-137:

"Our Paris correspondent writes that in relation to the balloon which is
said to have been seen over Bermuda, in September, no ascent took place
in France which can account for it."

Last of August: not September. In the London _Times_ there is no mention
of balloon ascents in Great Britain, in the summer of 1885, but mention
of two ascents in France. Both balloons had escaped. In _L'Aeronaute_,
August, 1885, it is said that these balloons had been sent up from fetes
of the fourteenth of July--44 days before the observation at Bermuda.
The aeronauts were Gower and Eloy. Gower's balloon was found floating on
the ocean, but Eloy's balloon was not found. Upon the 17th of July it
was reported by a sea captain: still in the air; still inflated.

But this balloon of Eloy's was a small exhibition balloon, made for
short ascents from fetes and fair grounds. In _La Nature_, 1885-2-131,
it is said that it was a very small balloon, incapable of remaining long
in the air.

As to contemporaneous ballooning in the United States, I find only one
account: an ascent in Connecticut, July 29, 1885. Upon leaving this
balloon, the aeronauts had pulled the "rip cord," "turning it inside
out." (_New York Times_, Aug. 10, 1885.)

To the Intermediatist, the accusation of "anthropomorphism" is
meaningless. There is nothing in anything that is unique or positivel