The Book of the Damned Part 21

Peasants believed in meteorites.

Scientists excluded meteorites.

Peasants believe in "thunderstones."

Scientists exclude "thunderstones."

It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields, and that scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms. We cannot take for a real base that, as to phenomena with which they are more familiar, peasants are more likely to be right than are scientists: a host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against us.

I should say that our "existence" is like a bridge--except that that comparison is in static terms--but like the Brooklyn Bridge, upon which mult.i.tudes of bugs are seeking a fundamental--coming to a girder that seems firm and final--but the girder is built upon supports. A support then seems final. But it is built upon underlying structures. Nothing final can be found in all the bridge, because the bridge itself is not a final thing in itself, but is a relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn. If our "existence" is a relationship between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute, the quest for finality in it is hopeless: everything in it must be relative, if the "whole" is not a whole, but is, itself, a relation.

In the att.i.tude of Acceptance, our pseudo-base is:

Cells of an embryo are in the reptilian era of the embryo;

Some cells feel stimuli to take on new appearances.

If it be of the design of the whole that the next era be mammalian, those cells that turn mammalian will be sustained against resistance, by inertia, of all the rest, and will be relatively right, though not finally right, because they, too, in time will have to give way to characters of other eras of higher development.

If we are upon the verge of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown, it will avail thee not to call us base-born and frowsy peasants.

In our crude, bucolic way, we now offer an outrage upon common sense that we think will some day be an unquestioned commonplace:

That manufactured objects of stone and iron have fallen from the sky:

That they have been brought down from a state of suspension, in a region of inertness to this earth's attraction, by atmospheric disturbances.

The "thunderstone" is usually "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped piece of greenstone," says a writer in the _Cornhill Magazine_, 50-517.

It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. Of course this writer says it's all superst.i.tion. Otherwise he'd be one of us crude and simple sons of the soil.

Conventional d.a.m.nation is that stone implements, already on the ground--"on the ground in the first place"--are found near where lightning was seen to strike: that are supposed by astonished rustics, or by intelligence of a low order, to have fallen in or with lightning.

Throughout this book, we cla.s.s a great deal of science with bad fiction.

When is fiction bad, cheap, low? If coincidence is overworked. That's one way of deciding. But with single writers coincidence seldom is overworked: we find the excess in the subject at large. Such a writer as the one of the _Cornhill Magazine_ tells us vaguely of beliefs of peasants: there is no ma.s.sing of instance after instance after instance.

Here ours will be the method of ma.s.s-formation.

Conceivably lightning may strike the ground near where there was a wedge-shaped object in the first place: again and again and again: lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in China; lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in Scotland; lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in Central Africa: coincidence in France; coincidence in Java; coincidence in South America--

We grant a great deal but note a tendency to restlessness. Nevertheless this is the psycho-tropism of science to all "thunderstones" said to have fallen luminously.

As to greenstone, it is in the island of Jamaica, where the notion is general that axes of a hard greenstone fall from the sky--"during the rains." (_Jour. Inst. Jamaica_, 2-4.) Some other time we shall inquire into this localization of objects of a specific material. "They are of a stone nowhere else to be found in Jamaica." (_Notes and Queries_, 2-8-24.)

In my own tendency to exclude, or in the att.i.tude of one peasant or savage who thinks he is not to be cla.s.sed with other peasants or savages, I am not very much impressed with what natives think. It would be hard to tell why. If the word of a Lord Kelvin carries no more weight, upon scientific subjects, than the word of a Sitting Bull, unless it be in agreement with conventional opinion--I think it must be because savages have bad table manners. However, my sn.o.bbishness, in this respect, loosens up somewhat before very widespread belief by savages and peasants. And the notion of "thunderstones" is as wide as geography itself.

The natives of Burma, China, j.a.pan, according to Blinkenberg (_Thunder Weapons_, p. 100)--not, of course, that Blinkenberg accepts one word of it--think that carved stone objects have fallen from the sky, because they think they have seen such objects fall from the sky. Such objects are called "thunderbolts" in these countries. They are called "thunderstones" in Moravia, Holland, Belgium, France, Cambodia, Sumatra, and Siberia. They're called "storm stones" in Lausitz; "sky arrows" in Slavonia; "thunder axes" in England and Scotland; "lightning stones" in Spain and Portugal; "sky axes" in Greece; "lightning flashes" in Brazil; "thunder teeth" in Amboina.

The belief is as widespread as is belief in ghosts and witches, which only the superst.i.tious deny today.

As to beliefs by North American Indians, Tyler gives a list of references (_Primitive Culture_, 2-237). As to South American Indians--"Certain stone hatchets are said to have fallen from the heavens." (_Jour. Amer. Folk Lore_, 17-203.)

If you, too, revolt against coincidence after coincidence after coincidence, but find our interpretation of "thunderstones" just a little too strong or rich for digestion, we recommend the explanation of one, Tallius, written in 1649:

"The naturalists say they are generated in the sky by fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circ.u.mfused humor."

Of course the paper in the _Cornhill Magazine_ was written with no intention of trying really to investigate this subject, but to deride the notion that worked-stone objects have ever fallen from the sky. A writer in the _Amer. Jour. Sci._, 1-21-325, read this paper and thinks it remarkable "that any man of ordinary reasoning powers should write a paper to prove that thunderbolts do not exist."

I confess that we're a little flattered by that.

Over and over:

"It is scarcely necessary to suggest to the intelligent reader that thunderstones are a myth."

We contend that there is a misuse of a word here: we admit that only we are intelligent upon this subject, if by intelligence is meant the inquiry of inequilibrium, and that all other intellection is only mechanical reflex--of course that intelligence, too, is mechanical, but less orderly and confined: less obviously mechanical--that as an acceptance of ours becomes firmer and firmer-established, we pa.s.s from the state of intelligence to reflexes in ruts. An odd thing is that intelligence is usually supposed to be creditable. It may be in the sense that it is mental activity trying to find out, but it is confession of ignorance. The bees, the theologians, the dogmatic scientists are the intellectual aristocrats. The rest of us are plebeians, not yet graduated to Nirvana, or to the instinctive and suave as differentiated from the intelligent and crude.

Blinkenberg gives many instances of the superst.i.tion of "thunderstones"

which flourishes only where mentality is in a lamentable state--or universally. In Malacca, Sumatra, and Java, natives say that stone axes have often been found under trees that have been struck by lightning.

Blinkenberg does not dispute this, but says it is coincidence: that the axes were of course upon the ground in the first place: that the natives jumped to the conclusion that these carved stones had fallen in or with lightning. In Central Africa, it is said that often have wedge-shaped, highly polished objects of stone, described as "axes," been found sticking in trees that have been struck by lightning--or by what seemed to be lightning. The natives, rather like the unscientific persons of Memphis, Tenn., when they saw snakes after a storm, jumped to the conclusion that the "axes" had not always been sticking in the trees.

Livingstone (_Last Journal_, pages 83, 89, 442, 448) says that he had never heard of stone implements used by natives of Africa. A writer in the _Report of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution_, 1877-308, says that there are a few.

That they are said, by the natives, to have fallen in thunderstorms.

As to luminosity, it is my lamentable acceptance that bodies falling through this earth's atmosphere, if not warmed even, often fall with a brilliant light, looking like flashes of lightning. This matter seems important: we'll take it up later, with data. In Prussia, two stone axes were found in the trunks of trees, one under the bark.

(Blinkenberg, _Thunder Weapons_, p. 100.)

The finders jumped to the conclusion that the axes had fallen there.

Another stone ax--or wedge-shaped object of worked stone--said to have been found in a tree that had been struck by something that looked like lightning. (_Thunder Weapons_, p. 71.)

The finder jumped to the conclusion.

Story told by Blinkenberg, of a woman, who lived near Kulsbjaergene, Sweden, who found a flint near an old willow--"near her house." I emphasize "near her house" because that means familiar ground. The willow had been split by something.

She jumped.

Cow killed by lightning, or by what looked like lightning (Isle of Sark, near Guernsey). The peasant who owned the cow dug up the ground at the spot and found a small greenstone "ax." Blinkenberg says that he jumped to the conclusion that it was this object that had fallen luminously, killing the cow.

_Reliquary_, 1867-208:

A flint ax found by a farmer, after a severe storm--described as a "fearful storm"--by a signal staff, which had been split by something. I should say that nearness to a signal staff may be considered familiar ground.

Whether he jumped, or arrived at the conclusion by a more leisurely process, the farmer thought that the flint object had fallen in the storm.

In this instance we have a lamentable scientist with us. It's impossible to have positive difference between orthodoxy and heresy: somewhere there must be a merging into each other, or an overlapping.

Nevertheless, upon such a subject as this, it does seem a little shocking. In most works upon meteorites, the peculiar, sulphurous odor of things that fall from the sky is mentioned. Sir John Evans (_Stone Implements_, p. 57) says--with extraordinary reasoning powers, if he could never have thought such a thing with ordinary reasoning powers--that this flint object "proved to have been the bolt, by its peculiar smell when broken."

If it did so prove to be, that settles the whole subject. If we prove that only one object of worked stone has fallen from the sky, all piling up of further reports is unnecessary. However, we have already taken the stand that nothing settles anything; that the disputes of ancient Greece are no nearer solution now than they were several thousand years ago--all because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to prove or solve or settle. Our object is to be more nearly real than our opponents. Wideness is an aspect of the Universal. We go on widely.

According to us the fat man is nearer G.o.dliness than is the thin man.

Eat, drink, and approximate to the Positive Absolute. Beware of negativeness, by which we mean indigestion.