Fragmentation

“ Planetary fragmentation which accompanied the dissolution of Roman civilization divided and sub-divided mankind into unnumbered self-contained segments: families, tribes, classes, villages, cities, kingdoms, principalities, nations, empires. They were separated from one another by geographic, ethnic, ideological and political barriers which were intensified by tradition, custom, migration, and the competitive struggles among the elite for pelf and power. Ignorance and superstition played a major role in the decentralizing process. ”

“ Gunshot Fracture of the Shaft of the Femur,
with Lodgment of the Missile.
The course of the shrapnel ball was from within outward, striking the femur with the energy of high (shrapnel) velocity, with fragmentation of the missile by impact on the bone. The largest fragment, by the distinct outline of its shadow, lies close to the plate and behind the bone; a smaller metal fragment has been carried to the outer border of the thigh, where it lies superficially; another fragment lies in the seat of fracture. ”

“ An instance migrating toward corruption in the same nature is that of dissolving froth or snow, for they lose their whiteness and assume the transparency of water in its pure state without air.
Nor should we by any means omit to state, that under migrating instances we must comprehend not only those which pass toward generation and destruction, but also those which pass toward increase or decrease, for they, too, assist in the discovery of the form, as is clear from our definition of a form and the Table of Degrees. ”

“ And for us who live, no worse can happen than has happened to the earliest drifts of man, marked to-day by ruined cities of forgotten civilisation--ruined cities, which, on excavation, are found to rest on ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and fourteen cities, down to a stratum where, still earlier, wandering herdsmen drove their flocks, and where, even preceding them, wild hunters chased their prey long after the cave-man and the man of the squatting-place cracked the knuckle-bones of wild animals and vanished from the earth. ”

“ Suddenly the rock upon which we stood began to crumble; huge fragments broke away at our very feet and went whirling down into the yawning gulf.
Hope!
The word was but mockery!
Chaos would have been more befitting, for chaos had surely come! ”

“ Before earth and sea and heaven were created, all things wore one aspect, to which we give the name of Chaos—a confused and shapeless mass, nothing but dead weight, in which, however, slumbered the seeds of things. ”

“ To get together the broken parts, scattered all about, and then to put them in order, to effect a recon­struction, is a hard work. It becomes harder still when some broken parts survive in fragments only, and when again, some fragments elude recognition in having been polished off and fitted into a new structure. ”

“ It is true that now and again streams are found flowing in the direction of a fault, but that is simply because the dislocation is a line of weakness, along which it is easier for the denuding forces to act. ”

“ Now, I saw that the elongated mound had sunk, collapsed, level with the rest of the spreading dust. And fresh atoms, impalpable, had settled above that mixture of grave-powder, which the aeons had ground. A long while, I stood, turned from the window. Gradually, I grew more collected, while the world slipped across the centuries into the future. ”

“ There is something unutterably solemn in watching the shade creep, day by day, round a circle whose diameter man might measure with his grave or even cover with his hand, and contrasting the limits within which it acts with the spaces of time which its stealing tread measures out, and feeling that it is the faithful index of a progress before which the individual being and the universal frame of things are alike hastening to rapid and inevitable decay. ”

“ This rhythm of evolution and dissolution, completing itself during short periods in small aggregates, and in the vast aggregates distributed through space completing itself in periods which are immeasurable by human thought, is, so far as we can see, universal and eternal: each alternating phase of the process predominating—now in this region of space, and now in that—as local conditions determine. ”

“ Do you not see that the chief teaching of geology—the piling of stratum upon stratum, the conversion of disrupted rock and decayed plant and animal into rock again—is here exemplified in the history of a domestic toy, which contains already one example of stratification in the silence of watery submergence? ”

“ As seam unites to seam, and layer to layer, stratum upon stratum, so the systems almost insensibly unite, and forms of life appear, mature, and die away as the babe grows into the man, and dies away again to old age and final extinction. ”

“ At the bottom of many precipitous abysses, where man’s foot had never descended, he saw hundreds of enormous trunks, hurled down by time, and heaped upon each other in decay; while at their foot, or between their crumbling branches, young ones were shooting up and flourishing. ”

“ Oftentimes a great line of fault has been repeated, or the movements have been continued through successive periods, so that, newer deposits having covered the old line of displacement, the strata both newer and older have given way along the old line of fracture. ”

“ These little heaps, which are raised by degrees, give way to permit the eruptive matter to escape, and afterwards fall in, when the tertiary formations are exhausted, in a space of time of greater or less duration. ”

“ Twilight rears the scaffolding first, then hangs the Night upon it. Otherwise the darkness would simply fall in lumps, and lie about in pools and blocks, unfinished--a ruin instead of a building. Everything must have a scaffolding first. ”

“ By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causes appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the mournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.
The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard. It was swaddled like a child and long like a man. There was a round thing at its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled. The scabbard was riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out between the rents. ”

“ We no longer live in the days when terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth. ”

“ Time and change have done their worst. A few scattered ruins, seen dimly through the mist of years, are all that remain to point to the inquiring wanderer the site of the stupendous struggle of which the results are felt even after the expiration of eight hundred years. ”

“ A fruitful decrepitude, under which germinates the new life. Little by little the ruin progresses; deep crevices, which are not visible, ramify in the darkness, and internally reduce to powder the venerable structure, which still appears a solid mass without; and suddenly, some fine day, this ancient ensemble of worm-eaten things, of which decaying societies are composed, becomes shapeless, the nails come out, the structure becomes disjointed, and overhangs. ”

“ Hundreds are in an instant swallowed up, or dashed against rocks, and miserably destroyed! Meanwhile all nature seems to be convulsed around; the rocks themselves are torn from their solid base, and, with their enormous fragments, crush whole bands of miserable wretches beneath! ”

“ Destruction is multi-faceted. Even the simplest system has a structure and performs functions. If the spatial continuity or arrangement of an entity's structure is severed or substantially transformed - its functions are usually adversely affected. ”

“ Why should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of disappearances and appearances, which is another name for the unceasing orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and which is nature? An individual counts for nothing in the lapse of twenty-four hours gone or come. ”

“ Blocks weighing unbelievable tons crash off them, or they will suddenly, without a second's warning, break into a million pieces. I can never conquer a creepiness of the spine as I listen to one of these tragedies. ”

“ Thus, they form a vast circle of generation and destruction—of combination and decomposition, which, it is quite reasonable to suppose, could never have had a beginning, and which, consequently can never have an end. ”

“ As if, in the gap he had left, the wedge of change were driven to the head, rending what was a solid mass to fragments, things cemented and held together by the usages of years, burst asunder in as many weeks. The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant ”

“ Vaguely, amid the half gloom, he caught glimpses of myriads of trunks of all forms, upright, inclined, twisted, crossed in strange postures of menace and of conflict; some overthrown on the earth, like towers which had fallen bodily, and covered with a dense and confused mass of vegetation, which seemed like a furious throng, disputing the ground span by span ”

“ The earlier inquirers, as often as they encountered a break in the regular sequence of formations, connected it theoretically with a sudden and violent catastrophe, which had put an end to the regular course of events that had been going on uninterruptedly for ages, annihilating at the same time all or nearly all the organic beings which had previously flourished, after which, order being re-established, a new series of events was initiated. ”

“ The alternations of generation and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres—this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. ”

“ But as we sank lower still, ever more cautiously, it was not the globes or the compartments' contents that held our attention so much as the astounding, stupefying fact that now was thrust upon us—namely that in all the gigantic compartmented city, in all its strange great black-walled rectangular and roofless enclosures, there moved no living being! ”

“ Many other falls we shall have record of, and in most of them segregation is the great mystery. A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force. Segregation of things that have fallen from the sky has been avoided as most deep-dyed of the damned. ”

“ The changes of past ages, as revealed in geology, have been brought about, not gradually, but by great convulsions of nature, such as volcanoes, or the deluge, that resulted in the destruction of the old order of things, and in a new creation. ”

“ In a few years there will be a more or less even line—at least a gentle undulation—instead of these raw, jagged breaks that give a disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings. ”

“ Therefore attraction and composition between the various elements is the means of life, and discord, decomposition and division produce death. Thus the cohesive and attractive forces in all things lead to the appearance of fruitful results and effects, while estrangement and alienation of things lead to disturbance and annihilation. Through affinity and attraction all living things like plants, animals and men come into existence, while division and discord bring about decomposition and destruction. ”

“ If the tensions change from moment to moment entirely, we have a broken, a fragmentary effect, as that of zigzag, where all is dropping and picking up again of associated motions; in the straight line, much prolonged, we have a gradual and inexorable rending of these tendencies to associated movements. ”

“ The continual process of undermining by the decay of the lower strata has caused periodical disruption of the hard upper stratum, which has fallen off in huge blocks and rolled down the rough inclines that form the sides. ”

“ May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been originally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of innumerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms? Such, certainly, would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame Jenyns or a Bolingbroke would suggest; but the geologist has learned from his science, that the completion of a chain of at least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot possibly have formed the design of Providence. ”

“ The entire variation from the original type, which any given kind of change can produce, may usually be effected in a brief period of time, after which no farther deviation can be obtained by continuing to alter the circumstances, though ever so gradually; indefinite divergence, either in the way of improvement or deterioration, being prevented, and the least possible excess beyond the defined limits being fatal to the existence of the individual. ”

“ But what is gained at the margin is lost in the centre; the attractions of the central systems bring their constituents together, which then, by the heat evolved, are converted once more into molecular chaos. ”