BOOK OF THE DAMNED 99 



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 dis- 

 turbances. 



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 superstition. Other- 

 wise he'd be one of us crude and simple sons of the soil. 



Conventional damnation 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 rus- 

 tics, or by intelligence of a low order, to have fallen in or with 

 lightning. 



Throughout this book, we class a great deal of science with bad 

 fiction. When is fiction bad, cheap, low? If coincidence is over- 

 worked. That's one way of deciding. But with single writers 

 coincidence seldom is overworked: we find the excess in the sub- 

 ject at large. Such a writer as the one of the Cornhill Magazine 

 tells us vaguely of beliefs of peasants: there is no massing of 

 instance after instance after instance. Here ours will be the 

 method of mass-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. Never- 

 theless 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 attitude of one peasant 



