Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/166

160 We now come to some "cursed" little things that are of the "lost," but for the "salvation" of which scientific missionaries have done their dam-dest.

"Pigmy flints."

They can't very well be denied.

They're lost and well known.

"Pigmy flints" are tiny, prehistoric implements. Some of them are a quarter of an inch in size. England, India, France, South Africa—they've been found in many parts of the world—whether showered there or not. They belong high up in the froth of the accursed: they are not denied, and they have not been disregarded; there is an abundant literature upon this subject. One attempt to rationalize them, or assimilate them, or take them into the scientific fold, has been the notion that they were toys of prehistoric children. It sounds reasonable. But, of course, by the reasonable we mean that for which the equally reasonable, but opposing, has not been found out—except that we modify that by saying that, though nothing's finally reasonable, some phenomena have higher approximations to Reasonableness than have others. Against the notion of toys, the higher approximation is that where "pigmy flints" are found, all flints are pigmies—at least so in India, where, when larger implements have been found in the same place, there are separations by strata. (Wilson.)

The datum that, just at present, leads me to accept that these flints were made by beings about the size of pickles, is a point brought out by Prof. Wilson (Rept. National Museum, 1892-455):

Not only that the flints are tiny but that the chipping upon them is "minute."

Struggle for expression, in the mind of a 19th-century-ite, of an idea that did not belong to his era:

In Science Gossip, 1896-36, R. A. Galty says:

"So fine is the chipping that to see the workmanship a magnifying glass is necessary.

I think that would be absolutely convincing, if there were anything—absolutely anything—either that tiny beings, from pickle to cucumber-stature made these things, or that ordinary savages made them under magnifying glasses.

The idea that we are now going to develop, or perpetrate, is rather intensely of the accursed, or the advanced. It's a lost soul, I admit—or boast—but it fits in. Or, as conventional as ever, our own