BOOK OF THE DAMNED 77 



data of which Nordenskiold made more nearly real than data in 

 opposition. 



So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the 

 preposterous, against Sir W. H. Thomson's notions of arrival upon 

 this earth of organisms on meteorites 



"I can only regard it as a jest" (Knowledge, 1-302). 



Or that there is nothing but jest or something intermediate to 

 jest and tragedy; 



That ours is not an existence but an utterance; 



That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often 

 with such success that some of us seem almost alive like characters 

 in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree 

 take their affairs away from the novelist 



That Momus is imagining us and our arts and sciences and re- 

 ligions, and is narrating or picturing us as a satire upon the gods' 

 real existence. 



Because with many of our data of coal that has fallen from the 

 sky as accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific 

 pronouncement that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, by which 

 we mean a consistent existence, or a state in which there is real 

 intelligence, or a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably 

 merge away with imbecility, could there have been such a row as 

 that which was raised about forty years ago over Dr. Hahn's 

 announcement that he had found fossils in meteorites? 



Accessible to anybody at that time: 



Philosophical Magazine, 4-17-425: 



That the substance that fell at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1857, 

 contained organic matter "analagous to fossil waxes." 



Or limestone: 



Of the block of limestone which was reported to have fallen at 

 Midleburgh, Florida, it is said (Science, 11-118) that, though 

 something had been seen to fall in "an old cultivated field," the 

 witnesses who ran to it picked up something that "had been upon 

 the ground in the first place." The writer who tells us this, with 

 the usual exclusion-imagination, known as stupidity, but unjustly, 

 because there is no real stupidity, thinks he can think of a good- 

 sized stone that had for many years been in a cultivated field, but 

 that had never been seen before had never interfered with plowing, 

 for instance. He is earnest and unjarred when he writes that this 

 stone weighs 200 pounds. My own notion, founded upon my own 

 experience in seeing, is that a block of stone weighing 500 pounds 



