Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/146

140 may have been to say that a sensational story of a strange stone said to have fallen, etc.

This stone was reported, by Major Frederick Burnham, of the British Army. Later Major Burnham re-visited it, and Mr. Holder accompanied him, their purpose to decipher the inscriptions upon it, if possible.

"This stone was a brown, igneous rock, its longest axis about eight feet, and on the eastern face, which had an angle of about forty-five degrees, was the deep-cut inscription."

Mr. Holder says that he recognized familiar Mayan symbols in the inscription. His method was the usual method by which anything can be "identified" as anything else: that is to pick out whatever is agreeable and disregard the rest. He says that he has demonstrated that most of the symbols are Mayan. One of our intermediatist pseudo-principles is that any way of demonstrating anything is just as good a way of demonstrating anything else. By Mr. Holder's method we could demonstrate that we're Mayan—if that should be a source of pride to us. One of the characters upon this stone is a circle within a circle—similar character found by Mr. Holder in a Mayan manuscript. There are two 6's. 6's can be found in Mayan manuscripts. A double scroll. There are dots and there are dashes. Well, then, we, in turn, disregard the circle within a circle and the double scroll and emphasize that 6's occur in this book, and that dots are plentiful, and would be more plentiful if it were customary to use the small "i" for the first personal pronoun—that when it comes to dashes—that's demonstrated: we're Mayan.

I suppose the tendency is to feel that we're sneering at some valuable archæologic work, and that Mr. Holder did make a veritable identification.

He writes:

"I submitted the photographs to the Field Museum and the Smithsonian and one or two others, and, to my surprise, the reply was that they could make nothing out of it."

Our indefinite acceptance, by preponderance of three or four groups of museum-experts against one person, is that a stone bearing inscriptions unassimilable with any known language upon this earth, is said to have fallen from the sky. Another poor wretch of an outcast belonging here is noted in the Scientific American, 48-261: that, of an object, or a meteorite, that fell Feb. 16, 1883, near Brescia, Italy, a false report was circulated that one of the