the same way. It was
impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not
required: only that with a higher seeming of positiveness than that of
his opponents, he should attempt. The thing to do, in 1492, was
nevertheless to accept that beyond Europe, to the west, were other
lands.

I offer for acceptance, as something concordant with the spirit of this
first quarter of the 20th century, the expression that beyond this earth
are--other lands--from which come things as, from America, float things
to Europe.

As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor
to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and
yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees.
_Symons' Meteorological Magazine_ is especially prudish in this respect
and regards as highly improper all advances made by other explainers.

Nevertheless, the _Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1877, reports a
golden-yellow fall, of Feb. 27, 1877, at Peckloh, Germany, in which four
kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There were
minute things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks.

They may have been symbols. They may have been objective hieroglyphics--

Mere passing fancy--let it go--

In the _Annales de Chimie_, 85-288, there is a list of rains said to
have contained sulphur. I have thirty or forty other notes. I'll not use
one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon a fall of pollen.
I said, to begin with, that our methods would be the methods of
theologians and scientists, and they always begin with an appearance of
liberality. I grant thirty or forty points to start with. I'm as liberal
as any of them--or that my liberality won't cost me anything--the
enormousness of the data that we shall have.

Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma, and the way it
works out:

In the _American Journal of Science_, 1-42-196, we are told of a yellow
substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one "windless" night
in June, in Pictou Harbor, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the
substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia and an
animal odor."

Now, one of our Intermediatist principles, to start with, is that so far
from positive, in the aspect of Homogeneousness, are all substances,
that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, anything can be
found anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of Greenland; bugs of