BOOK OF THE DAMNED 119 



And keep track of every person who came to examine that stone 

 trace down his affiliations keep track of him 



Then send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen at 

 Stockholm, say 



Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hampshire, be 

 met again in Stockholm? But what if he had no anthropological, 

 lapidarian, or meteorological affiliations but did belong to a secret 

 society 



It is only a dawning credulity. 



Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, 

 fallen from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most strik- 

 ing. So far, in this respect, we have been at our worst possibly 

 that's pretty bad but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable 

 variety of form, and something that is said to have fallen at some- 

 time somewhere in the Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the un- 

 chosen. 



Now we shall have something that is high up in the castes of 

 the accursed: 



Comptes Rendus, 1887-182: 



That, upon June 20, 1887, in a "violent storm" two months be- 

 fore the reported fall of the symmetric iron object of Brixton 

 a small stone had fallen from the sky at Tarbes, France: 13 

 millimeters in diameter; 5 millimeters thick; weight 2 grammes. 

 Reported to the French Academy by M. Sudre, professor of the 

 Normal School, Tarbes. 



This time the old convenience "there in the first place" is too 

 greatly resisted the stone was covered with ice. 



This object had been cut and shaped by means similar to hu- 

 man hands and human mentality. It was a disk of worked stone 

 "tres regulier." "II a ete assurement travaille." 



There's not a word as to any known whirlwind anywhere: noth- 

 ing of other objects or debris that fell at or near this date, in France. 

 The thing had fallen alone. But as mechanically as any part of a 

 machine responds to its stimulus, the explanation appears in Comp- 

 tes Rendus, that this stone had been raised by a whirlwind and then 

 flung down. 



It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more 

 important than this occurred. In La Nature, 1887, and in L'Annee 

 Scientifique, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one 

 of the summer numbers of Nature, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon 

 it in the Annuaire de Soc. Met., 1887. 



