The Book of the Damned

Why he should have abandoned such easily accessible coal, I don't know.

The important point is that there was no sign of boring: that this instrument was in a lump of coal that had closed around it so that its presence was not suspected, until the lump of coal was broken.

No mention can I find of this d.a.m.ned thing in any other publication. Of course there is an alternative here: the thing may not have fallen from the sky: if in coal-forming times, in Scotland, there were, indigenous to this earth, no men capable of making such an iron instrument, it may have been left behind by visitors from other worlds.

In an extraordinary approximation to fairness and justice, which is permitted to us, because we are quite as desirous to make acceptable that nothing can be proved as we are to sustain our own expressions, we note:

That in _Notes and Queries_, 11-1-408, there is an account of an ancient copper seal, about the size of a penny, found in chalk, at a depth of from five to six feet, near Bredenstone, England. The design upon it is said to be of a monk kneeling before a virgin and child: a legend upon the margin is said to be: "St. Jordanis Monachi Spaldingie."

I don't know about that. It looks very desirable--undesirable to us.

There's a wretch of an ultra-frowsy thing in the _Scientific American_, 7-298, which we condemn ourselves, if somewhere, because of the oneness of allness, the d.a.m.ned must also be the d.a.m.ning. It's a newspaper story: that about the first of June, 1851, a powerful blast, near Dorchester, Ma.s.s., cast out from a bed of solid rock a bell-shaped vessel of an unknown metal: floral designs inlaid with silver; "art of some cunning workman." The opinion of the Editor of the _Scientific American_ is that the thing had been made by Tubal Cain, who was the first inhabitant of Dorchester. Though I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not disposed to fly rabidly at every scientific opinion.

_Nature_, 35-36:

A block of metal found in coal, in Austria, 1885. It is now in the Salsburg museum.

This time we have another expression. Usually our intermediatist attack upon provincial positivism is: Science, in its attempted positivism takes something such as "true meteoritic material" as a standard of judgment; but carbonaceous matter, except for its relative infrequency, is just as veritable a standard of judgment; carbonaceous matter merges away into such a variety of organic substances, that all standards are reduced to indistinguishability: if, then, there is no real standard against us, there is no real resistance to our own acceptances. Now our intermediatism is: Science takes "true meteoritic material" as a standard of admission; but now we have an instance that quite as truly makes "true meteoritic material" a standard of exclusion; or, then, a thing that denies itself is no real resistance to our own acceptances--this depending upon whether we have a datum of something of "true meteoritic material" that orthodoxy can never accept fell from the sky.

We're a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a carved, geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates human life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an indigenous product of this earth: but we're quite as much interested in the dilemma it made for the faithful.

It is of "true meteoritic material." _L'Astronomie_, 1887-114, it is said that, though so geometric, its phenomena so characteristic of meteorites exclude the idea that it was the work of man.

As to the deposit--Tertiary coal.

Composition--iron, carbon, and a small quant.i.ty of nickel.

It has the pitted surface that is supposed by the faithful to be characteristic of meteorites.

For a full account of this subject, see _Comptes Rendus_, 103-702. The scientists who examined it could reach no agreement. They bifurcated: then a compromise was suggested; but the compromise is a product of disregard:

That it was of true meteoritic material, and had not been shaped by man;

That it was not of true meteoritic material, but telluric iron that had been shaped by man:

That it was true meteoritic material that had fallen from the sky, but had been shaped by man, after its fall.

The data, one or more of which must be disregarded by each of these three explanations, are: "true meteoritic material" and surface markings of meteorites; geometric form; presence in an ancient deposit; material as hard as steel; absence upon this earth, in Tertiary times, of men who could work in material as hard as steel. It is said that, though of "true meteoritic material," this object is virtually a steel object.

St. Augustine, with his orthodoxy, was never in--well, very much worse--difficulties than are the faithful here. By due disregard of a datum or so, our own acceptance that it was a steel object that had fallen from the sky to this earth, in Tertiary times, is not forced upon one. We offer ours as the only synthetic expression. For instance, in _Science Gossip_, 1887-58, it is described as a meteorite: in this account there is nothing alarming to the pious, because, though everything else is told, its geometric form is not mentioned.

It's a cube. There is a deep incision all around it. Of its faces, two that are opposite are rounded.

Though I accept that our own expression can only rather approximate to Truth, by the wideness of its inclusions, and because it seems, of four attempts, to represent the only complete synthesis, and can be nullified or greatly modified by data that we, too, have somewhere disregarded, the only means of nullification that I can think of would be demonstration that this object is a ma.s.s of iron pyrites, which sometimes forms geometrically. But the a.n.a.lysis mentions not a trace of sulphur. Of course our weakness, or impositiveness, lies in that, by anyone to whom it would be agreeable to find sulphur in this thing, sulphur would be found in it--by our own intermediatism there is some sulphur in everything, or sulphur is only a localization or emphasis of something that, unemphasized, is in all things.

So there have, or haven't, been found upon this earth things that fell from the sky, or that were left behind by extra-mundane visitors to this earth--

A yarn in the London _Times_, June 22, 1844: that some workmen, quarrying rock, close to the Tweed, about a quarter of a mile below Rutherford Mills, discovered a gold thread embedded in the stone at a depth of 8 feet: that a piece of the gold thread had been sent to the office of the _Kelso Chronicle_.

Pretty little thing; not at all frowsy; rather d.a.m.nable.

London _Times_, Dec. 24, 1851:

That Hiram De Witt, of Springfield, Ma.s.s., returning from California, had brought with him a piece of auriferous quartz about the size of a man's fist. It was accidentally dropped--split open--nail in it. There was a cut-iron nail, size of a six-penny nail, slightly corroded. "It was entirely straight and had a perfect head."

Or--California--ages ago, when auriferous quartz was forming--super-carpenter, million of miles or so up in the air--drops a nail.

To one not an intermediatist, it would seem incredible that this datum, not only of the d.a.m.ned, but of the lowest of the d.a.m.ned, or of the journalistic caste of the accursed, could merge away with something else d.a.m.ned only by disregard, and backed by what is called "highest scientific authority"--

Communication by Sir David Brewster (_Rept. Brit. a.s.soc._, 1845-51):

That a nail had been found in a block of stone from Kingoodie Quarry, North Britain. The block in which the nail was found was nine inches thick, but as to what part of the quarry it had come from, there is no evidence--except that it could not have been from the surface. The quarry had been worked about twenty years. It consisted of alternate layers of hard stone and a substance called "till." The point of the nail, quite eaten with rust, projected into some "till," upon the surface of the block of stone. The rest of the nail lay upon the surface of the stone to within an inch of the head--that inch of it was embedded in the stone.

Although its caste is high, this is a thing profoundly of the d.a.m.ned--sort of a Brahmin as regarded by a Baptist. Its case was stated fairly; Brewster related all circ.u.mstances available to him--but there was no discussion at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation: no explanation was offered--

Nevertheless the thing can be nullified--

But the nullification that we find is as much against orthodoxy in one respect as it is against our own expression that inclusion in quartz or sandstone indicates antiquity--or there would have to be a revision of prevailing dogmas upon quartz and sandstone and age indicated by them, if the opposing data should be accepted. Of course it may be contended by both the orthodox and us heretics that the opposition is only a yarn from a newspaper. By an odd combination, we find our two lost souls that have tried to emerge, chucked back to perdition by one blow:

_Pop. Sci. News_, 1884-41:

That, according to the _Carson Appeal_, there had been found in a mine, quartz crystals that could have had only 15 years in which to form: that, where a mill had been built, sandstone had been found, when the mill was torn down, that had hardened in 12 years: that in this sandstone was a piece of wood "with a nail in it."

_Annals of Scientific Discovery_, 1853-71:

That, at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation, 1853, Sir David Brewster had announced that he had to bring before the meeting an object "of so incredible a nature that nothing short of the strongest evidence was necessary to render the statement at all probable."

A crystal lens had been found in the treasure-house at Nineveh.

In many of the temples and treasure houses of old civilizations upon this earth have been preserved things that have fallen from the sky--or meteorites.

Again we have a Brahmin. This thing is buried alive in the heart of propriety: it is in the British Museum.

Carpenter, in _The Microscope and Its Revelations_, gives two drawings of it. Carpenter argues that it is impossible to accept that optical lenses had ever been made by the ancients. Never occurred to him--someone a million miles or so up in the air--looking through his telescope--lens drops out.

This does not appeal to Carpenter: he says that this object must have been an ornament.

According to Brewster, it was not an ornament, but "a true optical lens."

In that case, in ruins of an old civilization upon this earth, has been found an accursed thing that was, acceptably, not a product of any old civilization indigenous to this earth.

10

Early explorers have Florida mixed up with Newfoundland. But the confusion is worse than that still earlier. It arises from simplicity.

Very early explorers think that all land westward is one land, India: awareness of other lands as well as India comes as a slow process. I do not now think of things arriving upon this earth from some especial other world. That was my notion when I started to collect our data. Or, as is a commonplace of observation, all intellection begins with the illusion of h.o.m.ogeneity. It's one of Spencer's data: we see h.o.m.ogeneousness in all things distant, or with which we have small acquaintance. Advance from the relatively h.o.m.ogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous is Spencerian Philosophy--like everything else, so-called: not that it was really Spencer's discovery, but was taken from von Baer, who, in turn, was continuous with preceding evolutionary speculation.