Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/154

148 Translation by M. Jombard:

"Thy orders are laws: thou shinest in impetuous élan and rapid chamois."

M. Maurice Schwab:

"The chief of Emigration who reached these places (or this island) has fixed these characters forever."

M. Oppert:

"The grave of one who was assassinated here. May God, to revenge him, strike his murderer, cutting off the hand of his existence."

I like the first one best. I have such a vivid impression from it of some one polishing up brass or something, and in an awful hurry. Of course the third is more dramatic—still they're all very good. They are perturbations of one another, I suppose.

In Tract 44, Col. Whittelsey returns to the subject. He gives the conclusion of Major De Helward, at the Congress of Luxembourg, 1877:

"If Prof. Read and myself are right in the conclusion that the figures are neither of the Runic, Phœnician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Lybian, Celtic, or any other alphabet-language, its importance has been greatly over-rated."

Obvious to a child; obvious to any mentality not helplessly subjected to a system:

That just therein lies the importance of this object.

It is said that an ideal of science is to find out the new—but, unless a thing be of the old, it is "unimportant."

"It is not worth while." (Hovey.)

Then the inscribed ax, or wedge, which, according to Dr. John C. Evans, in a communication to the American Ethnological Society, was plowed up, near Pemberton, N. J., 1859. The characters upon this ax, or wedge, are strikingly similar to the characters on the Grave Creek stone. Also, with a little disregard here and a little more there, they look like tracks in the snow by some one's who's been out celebrating, or like your handwriting, or mine, when we think there's a certain distinction in illegibility. Method of disregard: anything's anything.

Dr. Abbott describes this object in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1875-260.

He says he has no faith in it.

All progress is from the outrageous to the commonplace. Or quasi-existence proceeds from rape to the crooning of lullabies.