BOOK OF THE DAMNED 117 



their purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and 

 adopt the simple: that they can be intelligible when derisive. 



All of which lands us in a confusion, worse, I think than we were 

 in before we so satisfactorily emerged from the distresses of but- 

 ter and blood and ink and paper and punk and silk. Now it's can- 

 non balls and axes and disks if a "lapstone" be a disk it's a flat 

 stone, at any rate. 



A great many scientists are good impressionists: they snub the 

 impertinences of details. Had he been of a coarse, grubbing nature, 

 I think Dr. Bodding could never have so simply and beautifully ex- 

 plained the occurrence of stone wedges in tree trunks. But to a 

 realist, the story would be something like this: 



A man who needed a tree, in a land of jungles, where, for some 

 unknown reason, every one's very selfish with his trees, conceives 

 that hammering stone wedges makes less noise than does the chop- 

 ping of wood: he and his descendants, in a course of many years, 

 cut down trees with wedges, and escape penalty, because it never 

 occurs to a prosecutor that the head of an ax is a wedge. 



The story is like every other attempted positivism beautiful and 

 complete, until we see what it excludes or disregards; whereupon it 

 becomes the ugly and incomplete but not absolutely, because there 

 is probably something of what is called foundation for it. Per- 

 haps a mentally incomplete Santal did once do something of the kind. 

 Story told to Dr. Bodding: in the usual scientific way, he makes a 

 dogma of an aberration. 



Or we did have to utter a little stress upon this matter, after 

 all. They're so hairy and attractive, these scientists of the igth 

 century. We feel the zeal of a Sitting Bull when we think of their 

 scalps. We shall have to have an expression of our own upon this 

 confusing subject. We have expressions: we don't call them ex- 

 planations: we've discarded explanations with beliefs. Though 

 every one who scalps is, in the oneness of allness, himself likely to 

 be scalped, there is such a discourtesy to an enemy as the wearing 

 of wigs. 



Cannon balls and wedges, and what may they mean? 



Bombardments of this earth 



Attempts to communicate 



Or visitors to this earth, long ago explorers from the moon 

 taking back with them, as curiosities, perhaps, implements of this 

 earth's prehistoric inhabitants a wreck a cargo of such things 



