Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/122

116 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. Bodding'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. Bodding'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 had 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