Chapter 11

We note an amusing little touch in the indefinite allusion to "a man," who with his un-named family, had "considered" that he had seen a stone fall. The "man" was the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, who was well-known in his day.

The next instance was reported by W.B. Tripp, F.R.M.S.--that, during a thunderstorm, a farmer had seen the ground in front of him plowed up by something that was luminous.

Dug.

Bronze ax.

My own notion is that an expedition to the North Pole could not be so urgent as that representative scientists should have gone to that farmer and there spent a summer studying this one reported occurrence. As it is--un-named farmer--somewhere--no date. The thing must stay damned.

Another specimen for our museum is a comment in _Nature_ upon these objects: that they are "of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of terrestrial, and not a celestial, character." Just why celestiality, or that of it which, too, is only of Intermediateness should not be quite as amusing as terrestriality is beyond our reasoning powers, which we have agreed are not ordinary. Of course there is nothing amusing about wedges and spheres at all--or Archimedes and Euclid are humorists. It is that they were described derisively. If you'd like a little specimen of the standardization of orthodox opinion--

_Amer. Met. Jour._, 4-589:

"They are of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of a terrestrial and not a celestial character."

I'm sure--not positively, of course--that we've tried to be as easygoing and lenient with Mr. Symons as his obviously scientific performance would permit. Of course it may be that sub-consciously we were prejudiced against him, instinctively classing him with St. Augustine, Darwin, St. Jerome, and Lyell. As to the "thunderstones," I think that he investigated them mostly "for the credit of Englishmen," or in the spirit of the Royal Krakatoa Committee, or about as the commission from the French Academy investigated meteorites. According to a writer in _Knowledge_, 5-418, the Krakatoa Committee attempted not in the least to prove what had caused the atmospheric effects of 1883, but to prove--that Krakatoa did it.

Altogether I should think that the following quotation should be enlightening to anyone who still thinks that these occurrences were investigated not to support an opinion formed in advance:

In opening his paper, Mr. Symons says that he undertook his investigation as to the existence of "thunderstones," or "thunderbolts" as he calls them--"feeling certain that there was a weak point somewhere, inasmuch as 'thunderbolts' have no existence."

We have another instance of the reported fall of a "cannon ball." It occurred prior to Mr. Symons' investigations, but is not mentioned by him. It was investigated, however. In the _Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin._, 3-147, is the report of a "thunderstone," "supposed to have fallen in Hampshire, Sept., 1852." It was an iron cannon ball, or it was a "large nodule of iron pyrites or bisulphuret of iron." No one had seen it fall. It had been noticed, upon a garden path, for the first time, after a thunderstorm. It was only a "supposed" thing, because--"It had not the character of any known meteorite."

In the London _Times_, Sept. 16, 1852, appears a letter from Mr. George E. Bailey, a chemist of Andover, Hants. He says that, in a very heavy thunderstorm, of the first week of September, 1852, this iron object, had fallen in the garden of Mr. Robert Dowling, of Andover; that it had fallen upon a path "within six yards of the house." It had been picked up "immediately" after the storm by Mrs. Dowling. It was about the size of a cricket ball: weight four pounds. No one had seen it fall. In the _Times_, Sept. 15, 1852, there is an account of this thunderstorm, which was of unusual violence.

There are some other data relative to the ball of quartz of Westmoreland. They're poor things. There's so little to them that they look like ghosts of the damned. However, ghosts, when multiplied, take on what is called substantiality--if the solidest thing conceivable, in quasi-existence, is only concentrated phantomosity. It is not only that there have been other reports of quartz that has fallen from the sky; there is another agreement. The round quartz object of Westmoreland, if broken open and separated from its loose nucleus, would be a round, hollow, quartz object. My pseudo-position is that two reports of similar extraordinary occurrences, one from England and one from Canada--are interesting.

_Proc. Canadian Institute_, 3-7-8:

That, at the meeting of the Institute, of Dec. 1, 1888, one of the members, Mr. J.A. Livingstone, exhibited a globular quartz body which he asserted had fallen from the sky. It had been split open. It was hollow.

But the other members of the Institute decided that the object was spurious, because it was not of "true meteoritic material."

No date; no place mentioned; we note the suggestion that it was only a geode, which had been upon the ground in the first place. Its crystalline lining was geode-like.

Quartz is upon the "index prohibitory" of Science. A monk who would read Darwin would sin no more than would a scientist who would admit that, except by the "up and down" process, quartz has ever fallen from the sky--but Continuity: it is not excommunicated if part of or incorporated in a baptized meteorite--St. Catherine's of Mexico, I think. It's as epicurean a distinction as any ever made by theologians. Fassig lists a quartz pebble, found in a hailstone (_Bibliography_, part 2-355). "Up and down," of course. Another object of quartzite was reported to have fallen, in the autumn of 1880, at Schroon Lake, N.Y.--said in the _Scientific American_, 43-272 to be a fraud--it was not--the usual. About the first of May, 1899, the newspapers published a story of a "snow-white" meteorite that had fallen, at Vincennes, Indiana. The Editor of the _Monthly Weather Review_ (issue of April, 1899) requested the local observer, at Vincennes, to investigate. The Editor says that the thing was only a fragment of a quartz boulder. He says that anyone with at least a public school education should know better than to write that quartz has ever fallen from the sky.

_Notes and Queries_, 2-8-92:

That, in the Leyden Museum of Antiquities, there is a disk of quartz: 6 centimeters by 5 millimeters by about 5 centimeters; said to have fallen upon a plantation in the Dutch West Indies, after a meteoric explosion.

Bricks.

I think this is a vice we're writing. I recommend it to those who have hankered for a new sin. At first some of our data were of so frightful or ridiculous mien as to be hated, or eyebrowed, was only to be seen. Then some pity crept in? I think that we can now embrace bricks.

The baked-clay-idea was all right in its place, but it rather lacks distinction, I think. With our minds upon the concrete boats that have been building terrestrially lately, and thinking of wrecks that may occur to some of them, and of a new material for the deep-sea fishes to disregard--

Object that fell at Richland, South Carolina--yellow to gray--said to look like a piece of brick. (_Amer. Jour. Sci._, 2-34-298.)

Pieces of "furnace-made brick" said to have fallen--in a hailstorm--at Padua, August, 1834. (_Edin. New Phil. Jour._, 19-87.) The writer offered an explanation that started another convention: that the fragments of brick had been knocked from buildings by the hailstones. But there is here a concomitant that will be disagreeable to anyone who may have been inclined to smile at the now digestible--enough notion that furnace-made bricks have fallen from the sky. It is that in some of the hailstones--two per cent of them--that were found with the pieces of brick, was a light grayish powder.

_Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society_, 337-365:

Padre Sechi explains that a stone said to have fallen, in a thunderstorm, at Supino, Italy, September, 1875, had been knocked from a roof.

_Nature_, 33-153:

That it had been reported that a good-sized stone, of form clearly artificial, had fallen at Naples, November, 1885. The stone was described by two professors of Naples, who had accepted it as inexplicable but veritable. They were visited by Dr. H. Johnstone-Lavis, the correspondent to _Nature_, whose investigations had convinced him that the object was a "shoemaker's lapstone."

Now to us of the initiated, or to us of the wider outlook, there is nothing incredible in the thought of shoemakers in other worlds--but I suspect that this characterization is tactical.

This object of worked stone, or this shoemaker's lapstone, was made of Vesuvian lava, Dr. Johnstone-Lavis thinks: most probably of lava of the flow of 1631, from the La Scala quarries. We condemn "most probably" as bad positivism. As to the "men of position," who had accepted that this thing had fallen from the sky--"I have now obliged them to admit their mistake," says Dr. Johnstone-Lavis--or it's always the stranger in Naples who knows La Scala lava better than the natives know it.

Explanation:

That the thing had been knocked from, or thrown from, a roof.

As to attempt to trace the occurrence to any special roof--nothing said upon that subject. Or that Dr. Johnstone-Lavis called a carved stone a "lapstone," quite as Mr. Symons called a spherical object a "cannon ball": bent upon a discrediting incongruity:

Shoemaking and celestiality.

It is so easy to say that axes, or wedge-shaped stones found on the ground, were there in the first place, and that it is only coincidence that lightning should strike near one--but the credibility of coincidences decreases as the square root of their volume, I think. Our massed instances speak too much of coincidences of coincidences. But the axes, or wedge-shaped objects that have been found in trees, are more difficult for orthodoxy. For instance, Arago accepts that such finds have occurred, but he argues that, if wedge-shaped stones have been found in tree trunks, so have toads been found in tree trunks--did the toads fall there?

Not at all bad for a hypnotic.

Of course, in our acceptance, the Irish are the Chosen People. It's because they are characteristically best in accord with the underlying essence of quasi-existence. M. Arago answers a question by asking another question. That's the only way a question can be answered in our Hibernian kind of an existence.

Dr. Bodding argued with the natives of the Santal Parganas, India, who said that cut and shaped stones had fallen from the sky, some of them lodging in tree trunks. Dr. Bodding, with orthodox notions of velocity of falling bodies, having missed, I suppose, some of the notes I have upon large hailstones, which, for size, have fallen with astonishingly low velocity, argued that anything falling from the sky would be "smashed to atoms." He accepts that objects of worked stone have been found in tree trunks, but he explains:

That the Santals often steal trees, but do not chop them down in the usual way, because that would be to make too much noise: they insert stone wedges, and hammer them instead: then, if they should be caught, wedges would not be the evidence against them that axes would be.

Or that a scientific man can't be desperate and reasonable too.

Or that a pickpocket, for instance, is safe, though caught with his hand in one's pocket, if he's gloved, say: because no court in the land would regard a gloved hand in the same way in which a bare hand would be regarded.

That there's nothing but intermediateness to the rational and the preposterous: that this status of our own ratiocinations is perceptible wherein they are upon the unfamiliar.

Dr. Bodding collected 50 of these shaped stones, said to have fallen from the sky, in the course of many years. He says that the Santals are a highly developed race, and for ages have not used stone implements--except in this one nefarious convenience to him.

All explanations are localizations. They fade away before the universal. It is difficult to express that black rains in England do not originate in the smoke of factories--less difficult to express that black rains of South Africa do not. We utter little stress upon the absurdity of Dr. Bedding's explanation, because, if anything's absurd everything's absurd, or, rather, has in it some degree or aspect of absurdity, and we've never had experience with any state except something somewhere between ultimate absurdity and final reasonableness. Our acceptance is that Dr. Bedding's elaborate explanation does not apply to cut-stone objects found in tree trunks in other lands: we accept that for the general, a local explanation is inadequate.

As to "thunderstones" not said to have fallen luminously, and not said to have been found sticking in trees, we are told by faithful hypnotics that astonished rustics come upon prehistoric axes that have been washed into sight by rains, and jump to the conclusion that the things have fallen from the sky. But simple rustics come upon many prehistoric things: scrapers, pottery, knives, hammers. We have no record of rusticity coming upon old pottery after a rain, reporting the fall of a bowl from the sky.

Just now, my own acceptance is that wedge-shaped stone objects, formed by means similar to human workmanship, have often fallen from the sky. Maybe there are messages upon them. My acceptance is that they have been called "axes" to discredit them: or the more familiar a term, the higher the incongruity with vague concepts of the vast, remote, tremendous, unknown.

In _Notes and Queries_, 2-8-92, a writer says that he had a "thunderstone," which he had brought from Jamaica. The description is of a wedge-shaped object; not of an ax:

"It shows no mark of having been attached to a handle."

Of ten "thunderstones," figured upon different pages in Blinkenberg's book, nine show no sign of ever having been attached to a handle: one is perforated.

But in a report by Dr. C. Leemans, Director of the Leyden Museum of Antiquities, objects, said by the Japanese to have fallen from the sky, are alluded to throughout as "wedges." In the _Archaeologic Journal_, 11-118, in a paper upon the "thunderstones" of Java, the objects are called "wedges" and not "axes."

Our notion is that rustics and savages call wedge-shaped objects that fall from the sky, "axes": that scientific men, when it suits their purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and adopt the simple: that they can be intelligible when derisive.

All of which lands us in a confusion, worse, I think, than we were in before we so satisfactorily emerged from the distresses of--butter and blood and ink and paper and punk and silk. Now it's cannon balls and axes and disks--if a "lapstone" be a disk--it's a flat stone, at any rate.

A great many scientists are good impressionists: they snub the impertinences of details. Had he been of a coarse, grubbing nature, I think Dr. Bodding could never have so simply and beautifully explained the occurrence of stone wedges in tree trunks. But to a realist, the story would be something like this:

A man who needed a tree, in a land of jungles, where, for some unknown reason, everyone's very selfish with his trees, conceives that hammering stone wedges makes less noise than does the chopping of wood: he and his descendants, in a course of many years, cut down trees with wedges, and escape penalty, because it never occurs to a prosecutor that the head of an ax is a wedge.

The story is like every other attempted positivism--beautiful and complete, until we see what it excludes or disregards; whereupon it becomes the ugly and incomplete--but not absolutely, because there is probably something of what is called foundation for it. Perhaps a mentally incomplete Santal did once do something of the kind. Story told to Dr. Bodding: in the usual scientific way, he makes a dogma of an aberration.

Or we did have to utter a little stress upon this matter, after all. They're so hairy and attractive, these scientists of the 19th century. We feel the zeal of a Sitting Bull when we think of their scalps. We shall have to have an expression of our own upon this confusing subject. We have expressions: we don't call them explanations: we've discarded explanations with beliefs. Though everyone who scalps is, in the oneness of allness, himself likely to be scalped, there is such a discourtesy to an enemy as the wearing of wigs.

Cannon balls and wedges, and what may they mean?

Bombardments of this earth--

Attempts to communicate--

Or visitors to this earth, long ago--explorers from the moon--taking back with them, as curiosities, perhaps, implements of this earth's prehistoric inhabitants--a wreck--a cargo of such things held for ages in suspension in the Super-Sargasso Sea--falling, or shaken, down occasionally by storms--

But, by preponderance of description, we cannot accept that "thunderstones" ever were attached to handles, or are prehistoric axes--

As to attempts to communicate with this earth by means of wedge-shaped objects especially adapted to the penetration of vast, gelatinous areas spread around this earth--

In the _Proc. Roy. Irish Acad._, 9-337, there is an account of a stone wedge that fell from the sky, near Cashel, Tipperary, Aug. 2, 1865. The phenomenon is not questioned, but the orthodox preference is to call it, not ax-like, nor wedge-shaped, but "pyramidal." For data of other pyramidal stones said to have fallen from the sky, see _Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1861-34. One fell at Segowolee, India, March 6, 1853. Of the object that fell at Cashel, Dr. Haughton says in the _Proceedings_: "A singular feature is observable in this stone, that I have never seen in any other:--the rounded edges of the pyramid are sharply marked by lines on the black crust, as perfect as if made by a ruler." Dr. Haughton's idea is that the marks may have been made by "some peculiar tension in the cooling." It must have been very peculiar, if in all aerolites not wedge-shaped, no such phenomenon had ever been observed. It merges away with one or two instances known, after Dr. Haughton's time, of seeming stratification in meteorites. Stratification in meteorites, however, is denied by the faithful.

I begin to suspect something else.

A whopper is coming.

Later it will be as reasonable, by familiarity, as anything else ever said.

If someone should study the stone of Cashel, as Champollion studied the Rosetta stone, he might--or, rather, would inevitably--find meaning in those lines, and translate them into English--

Nevertheless I begin to suspect something else: something more subtle and esoteric than graven characters upon stones that have fallen from the sky, in attempts to communicate. The notion that other worlds are attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion is that it is not attempt at all--that it was achievement centuries ago.

I should like to send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen, say, somewhere in New Hampshire--

And keep track of every person who came to examine that stone--trace down his affiliations--keep track of him--

Then send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen at Stockholm, say--

Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hampshire, be met again in Stockholm? But--what if he had no anthropological, lapidarian, or meteorological affiliations--but did belong to a secret society--

It is only a dawning credulity.

Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, fallen from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most striking. So far, in this respect, we have been at our worst--possibly that's pretty bad--but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable variety of form, and something that is said to have fallen at sometime somewhere in the Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the unchosen.

Now we shall have something that is high up in the castes of the accursed:

_Comptes Rendus_, 1887-182:

That, upon June 20, 1887, in a "violent storm"--two months before the reported fall of the symmetric iron object of Brixton--a small stone had fallen from the sky at Tarbes, France: 13 millimeters in diameter; 5 millimeters thick; weight 2 grammes. Reported to the French Academy by M. Sudre, professor of the Normal School, Tarbes.

This time the old convenience "there in the first place" is too greatly resisted--the stone was covered with ice.

This object had been cut and shaped by means similar to human hands and human mentality. It was a disk of worked stone--"tres regulier." "Il a été assurement travaillé."

There's not a word as to any known whirlwind anywhere: nothing of other objects or débris that fell at or near this date, in France. The thing had fallen alone. But as mechanically as any part of a machine responds to its stimulus, the explanation appears in _Comptes Rendus_ that this stone had been raised by a whirlwind and then flung down.

It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In _La Nature_, 1887, and in _L'Année Scientifique_, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of _Nature_, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the _Annuaire de Soc. Met._, 1887.

Not a word of discussion.

Not a subsequent mention can I find.

Our own expression:

What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain?

A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.

9

My own pseudo-conclusion:

That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.

Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the accursed.

If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of dream-phantasms.

Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky--as if in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the essence of everything, or in the merging away of everything into something else, there could be anything that could be accounted for in only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason that if something can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted for in that way--or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it imposes, but, of course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be found in quasi-existence. In our acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are, in our "existence," premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer.

Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of "true meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may seem incredible that modern curators still have this delusion, but we suspect that the date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity all day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn that some of the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a field"--"found in making a road"--"turned up by the plow" occurs a dozen times. Someone fishing in Lake Okeechobee, brought up an object in his fishing net. No meteorite had ever been seen to fall near it. The U.S. National Museum accepts it.