BOOK OF THE DAMNED 123 



Mr. Hovey says that the list might be extended indefinitely. 

 That's a tantalizing suggestion of some very interesting stuff 



He says: 



"But it is not worth while." 



I'd like to know what strange, damned, excommunicated things 

 have been sent to museums by persons who have felt convinced that 

 they had seen what they may have seen, strongly enough to risk 

 ridicule, to make up bundles, go to express offices, and write let- 

 ters. I accept that over the door of every museum, into which such 

 things enter, is written: 



"Abandon Hope." 



If a Mr. Symons mentions one instance of coal, or of slag or 

 cinders, said to have fallen from the sky, we are not except by as- 

 sociation with the "carbonaceous" meteorites strong in our im- 

 pression that coal sometimes falls to this earth from coal-burning 

 super-constructions, up somewhere 



In Comptes Rendus, 91-197, M. Daubree tells the same story. 

 Our acceptance, then, is that other curators could tell this same 

 story. Then the phantomosity of our impression substantiates pro- 

 portionately to its multiplicity. ,_M. Daubree says that often have 

 strange damned things been sent to the French museums, accom- 

 panied by assurances that they had been seen to fall from the sky. 

 Especially to our interest, he mentions coal and slag. 



Excluded. 



Buried un-named and undated in Science's potter's field. 



I do not say that the data of the damned should have the same 

 rights as the data of the saved. That would be justice. That 

 would be of the Positive Absolute, and, though the ideal of, a viola- 

 tion of, the very essence of quasi-existence, wherein only to have 

 the appearance of being is to express a preponderance of force one 

 way or another or inequilibrium, or inconsistency, or injustice. 



Our acceptance is that the passing away of exclusionism is a 

 phenomenon of the twentieth century: that gods of the twentieth 

 century will sustain our notions be they ever so unwashed and 

 frowsy. But, in our own expressions, we are limited, by the 

 oneness of quasiness, to the very same methods by which orthodoxy 

 established and maintains its now sleek, suave preposterousnesses. 

 At any rate, though we are inspired by an especial subtle essence 

 or imponderable, I think that pervades the twentieth century, we 

 have not the superstition that we are offering anything as a posi- 

 tive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that we're any less 



