gion of
suspension over this earth--wafting near each other--long
duration--final precipitation by atmospheric disturbance--with hail--or
that hailstones, too, when large, are phenomena of suspension of long
duration: that it is highly unacceptable that the very large ones could
become so great only in falling from the clouds.

Over and over has the note of disagreeableness, or of putrefaction, been
struck--long duration. Other indications of long duration.

I think of a region somewhere above this earth's surface in which
gravitation is inoperative and is not governed by the square of the
distance--quite as magnetism is negligible at a very short distance from
a magnet. Theoretically the attraction of a magnet should decrease with
the square of the distance, but the falling-off is found to be almost
abrupt at a short distance.

I think that things raised from this earth's surface to that region have
been held there until shaken down by storms--

The Super-Sargasso Sea.

Derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast
out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets, things
from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of Mars and
Jupiter and Neptune; things raised by this earth's cyclones: horses and
barns and elephants and flies and dodoes, moas, and pterodactyls; leaves
from modern trees and leaves of the Carboniferous era--all, however,
tending to disintegrate into homogeneous-looking muds or dusts, red or
black or yellow--treasure-troves for the palaeontologists and for the
archaeologists--accumulations of centuries--cyclones of Egypt, Greece,
and Assyria--fishes dried and hard, there a short time: others there
long enough to putrefy--

But the omnipresence of Heterogeneity--or living fishes, also--ponds of
fresh water: oceans of salt water.

As to the Law of Gravitation, I prefer to take one simple stand:

Orthodoxy accepts the correlation and equivalence of forces:

Gravitation is one of these forces.

All other forces have phenomena of repulsion and of inertness
irrespective of distance, as well as of attraction.

But Newtonian Gravitation admits attraction only:

Then Newtonian Gravitation can be only one-third acceptable even to the
orthodox, or there is denial of the correlation and equivalence of
forces.

Or still simpler:

Here are the data.

Make what you will, yourself, of them.

In our Intermediatist revolt against homogeneous, or posit