CHAPTER SIX
ENGLISH MECHANIC, 56-184:
That, upon April 25, 1892, Archdeacon Nouri climbed Mt. Ararat. It was his hope that he should find something of archaeologic compensation for his clamberings. He found Noah’s Ark.
About the same time, Dr. Holden, Director of the Lick Observatory, was watching one of the polished and mysterious-looking instruments that, in the new ikonology, have replaced the images of saints. Dr. Holden was waiting for the appointed moment of the explosion of a large quantity of dynamite in San Francisco Bay. The moment came. The polished little “saint” revealed to the faithful scientist. He wrote an account of the record, and sent copies to the San Francisco newspapers. Then he learned that the dynamite had not been fired off. He sent a second messenger after the first messenger, and, because mes¬sengers sometimes have velocities proportional to urgencies—“the Observatory escaped ridicule by a narrow margin.” See the Observatory, 20-467. This revelation came from Prof. Colton, who, though probably faithful to all the “saints,” did not like Dr. Holden.
The system that Archdeacon Nouri represented lost its power because its claims exceeded all conceivableness, and because, in other respects, of its inertness to the obvious. The system that Dr. Holden represented is not different: there is the same seeing of whatever may be desirable, and the same profound meditations upon the remote, with the same inattention to fairly acceptable starting-points. The astronomers like to tell audiences of just what gases are burning in an unimaginably remote star, but have never reasonably made acceptable, for instance, that this earth is round, to start with. Of course I do not mean to say that this, or anything else, can be positively proved, but it is depressing to
42
