BOOK OF THE DAMNED 125 



an ancient copper seal, about the size of a penny, found in chalk, 

 at a depth of from five to six feet, near Bredenstone, England. The 

 design upon it is said to be of a monk kneeling before a virgin and 

 child: a legend upon the margin is said to be: "St. Jordanis Monachi 

 Spaldingie." 



I don't know about that. It looks very desirable undesirable to 

 us. 



There's a wretch of an ultra-frowsy thing in the Scientific Ameri- 

 can, 7-298, which we condemn ourselves, if somewhere, because 

 of the oneness of allness, the damned must also be the damning. It's 

 a newspaper story: that about the first of June, 1851, a powerful 

 blast, near Dorchester, Mass., cast out from a bed of solid rock 

 a bell-shaped vessel of an unknown metal: floral designs inlaid with 

 silver; "art of some cunning workman." The opinion of the Editor 

 of the Scientific American is that the thing had been made by 

 Tubal Cain, who was the first inhabitant of Dorchester. Though 

 I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not disposed to fly rabidly 

 at every scientific opinion. 



Nature, 35-36: 



A block of metal found in coal, in Austria, 1885. It is now in the 

 Salsburg museum. 



This time we have another expression. Usually our intermediatist 

 attack upon provincial positivism is: Science, in its attempted posi- 

 tivism takes something such as "true meteoritic material" as a 

 standard of judgment; but carbonaceous matter, except for its rela- 

 tive infrequency, is just as veritable a standard of judgment; car- 

 bonaceous matter merges away into such a variety of organic sub- 

 stances, that all standards are reduced to indistinguishability: if, 

 then, there is no real standard against us, there is no real resistance 

 to our own acceptances. Now our intermediatism is: Science takes 

 "true meteoritic material" as a standard of admission; but now 

 we have an instance that quite as truly makes "true meteoritic ma- 

 terial" a standard of exclusion; or, then, a thing that denies itself 

 is no real resistance to our own acceptances this depending upon 

 whether we have a datum of something of "true meteoritic material" 

 that orthodoxy can never accept fell from the sky. 



We're a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a 

 carved, geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates 

 human life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an in- 

 digenous product of this earth: but we're quite as much interested in 

 the dilemma it made for the faithful. 



