Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/130

124 superstitious and credulous than any logician, savage, curator, or rustic.

An orthodox demonstration, in terms of which we shall have some heresies is that if things found in coal could have got there only by falling there—they fell there.

So, in the ''Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Mems.'', 2-9-306, it is argued that certain roundish stones that have been found in coal are "fossil aerolites": that they had fallen from the sky, ages ago, when the coal was soft, because the coal had closed around them, showing no sign of entrance.

''Proc. Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland'', 1-1-121:

That, in a lump of coal, from a mine in Scotland, an iron instrument had been found

"The interest attaching to this singular relic arises from the fact of its having been found in the heart of a piece of coal, seven feet under the surface."

If we accept that this object of iron was of workmanship beyond the means and skill of the primitive men who may have lived in Scotland when coal was forming there

"The instrument was considered to be modern."

That our expression has more of realness, or higher approximation to realness, than has the attempt to explain that is made in the Proceedings:

That in modern times some one may have bored for coal, and that his drill may have broken off in the coal it had penetrated.

Why he should have abandoned such easily accessible coal, I don't know. The important point is that there was no sign of boring: that this instrument was in a lump of coal that had closed around it so that its presence was not suspected, until the lump of coal was broken.

No mention can I find of this damned thing in any other publication. Of course there is an alternative here: the thing may not have fallen from the sky: if in coal-forming times, in Scotland, there were, indigenous to this earth, no men capable of making such an iron instrument, it may have been left behind by visitors from other worlds.

In an extraordinary approximation to fairness and justice, which is permitted to us, because we are quite as desirous to make acceptable that nothing can be proved as we are to sustain our own expressions, we note:

That in Notes and Queries, 11-1-408, there is an account of