Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/128

122 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. Some one 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.

If we have accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic material"—one instance of "carbonaceous" matter—if it be too difficult to utter the word "coal"—we see that in this inclusion-exclusion, as in every other means of forming an opinion, false inclusion and false exclusion have been practiced by curators of museums.

There is something of ultra-pathos—of cosmic sadness—in this universal search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by either inspiration or analysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown—or renewed hope and search for the special that can be true, or for something local that could also be universal. It's as if "true meteoritic material" were a "rock of ages" to some scientific men. They cling. But clingers cannot hold out welcoming arms.

The only seemingly conclusive utterance, or seemingly substantial thing to cling to, is a product of dishonesty, ignorance, or fatigue. All sciences go back and back, until they're worn out with the process, or until mechanical reaction occurs: then they move forward—as it were. Then they become dogmatic, and take for bases, positions that were only points of exhaustion. So chemistry divided and sub-divided down to atoms; then, in the essential insecurity of all quasi-constructions, it built up a system, which, to any one so obsessed by his own hypnoses that he is exempt to the chemist's hypnoses, is perceptibly enough an intellectual anæmia built upon infinitesimal debilities.

In Science, n.s., 31-298, E. D. Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, asserts or confesses, that often have objects of material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him. He says that these things have been accompanied by assurances that they have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses.

They are all excluded. They are not of true meteoritic material. They were on the ground in the first place. It is only by coincidence that lightning has struck, or that a real meteorite, which was unfindable, has struck near objects of slag and limestone.