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--
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:
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.
In our Intermediatist revolt against homogeneous, or positive, explanations, or our acceptance that the all-sufficing cannot be less than universality, besides which, however, there would be nothing to suffice, our expression upon the Super-Sargasso Sea, though it harmonizes with data of fishes that fall as if from a stationary source--and, of course, with other data, too--is inadequate to account for two peculiarities of the falls of frogs: