Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/164

158 apples to other systems: so Prof. Marsh, a loyal and unscrupulous systematist, argues:

"The size of these footprints and specially the width between the right and left series, are strong evidence that they were not made by men, as has been so generally supposed."

So these excluders. Stranglers of Minerva. Desperadoes of disregard. Above all, or below all, the anthropologists. I'm inspired with a new insult—some one offends me: I wish to express almost absolute contempt for him—he's a systematistic anthropologist. Simply to read something of this kind is not so impressive as to see for one's self: if any one will take the trouble to look up these footprints, as pictured in the Journal, he will either agree with Prof. Marsh or feel that to deny them is to indicate a mind as profoundly enslaved by a system as was ever the humble intellect of a medieval monk. The reasoning of this representative phantom of the chosen, or of the spectral appearances who sit in judgment, or condemnation, upon us of the more nearly real:

That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not giants.

We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of course—Stonehenge, for instance. It may be that, as time goes on, we shall have to admit that there are remains of many tremendous habitation of giants upon this earth, and that their appearances here were more than casual—but their bones—or the absence of their bones

Except—that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my disposition may be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History, dark cynicisms arise the moment I come to the fossils—or old bones that have been found upon this earth—gigantic things—that have been reconstructed into terrifying but "proper" dinosaurs—but my uncheerfulness

The dodo did it.

On one of the floors below the fossils, they have a reconstructed dodo. It's frankly a fiction: it's labeled as such—but it's been reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly

Fairies.

"Fairy crosses."

Harper's Weekly, 50-715:

That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny