Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/125

Rh 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.