"
"But even here," he continues, "there is no finality. Better a
thousand times my conclusions should be discredited than that my
dead name should lie across the threshold of the temple of
Science--a bar to further inquiry."
So died Lavalle--a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at
his funeral Cellier jested at "him who had gone to discover the
secrets of the Aurora Borealis."
If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that
Collier's theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous
deductions of the Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive
and warring dreams we have, definitely, Lavalle's Law of the
Cyclone which he surprised in darkness and cold at the foot of
the overarching throne of the Aurora Borealis. It is there that
I, intent on my own investigations, have passed and re-passed a
hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the snow beneath
him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon the
North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism
of his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned
to the zenith.
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