Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/123

Rh 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, every one'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 every one 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