140 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



may have been to say that a sensational story of a strange stone 

 said to have fallen, etc. 



This stone was reported, by Major Frederick Burnham, of the 

 British Army. Later Major Burnham re-visited it, and Mr. Holder 

 accompanied him, their purpose to decipher the inscriptions upon 

 it, if possible. 



"This stone was a brown, igneous rock, its longest axis about 

 eight feet, and on the eastern face, which had an angle of about 

 forty-five degrees, was the deep-cut inscription." 



Mr. Holder says that he recognized familiar Mayan symbols in 

 the inscription. His method was the usual method by which any- 

 thing can be "identified" as anything else: that is to pick out what- 

 ever is agreeable and disregard the rest. He says that he has dem- 

 onstrated that most of the symbols are Mayan. One of our interme- 

 diatist pseudo-principles is that any way of demonstrating any- 

 thing is just as good a way of demonstrating anything else. By Mr. 

 Holder's method we could demonstrate that we're Mayan if that 

 should be a source of pride to us. One of the characters upon this 

 stone is a circle within a circle similar character found by Mr. 

 Holder in a Mayan manuscript. There are two 6's. 6's can be 

 found in Mayan manuscripts. A double scroll. There are dots 

 and there are dashes. Well, then, we, in turn, disregard the circle 

 within a circle and the double scroll and emphasize that 6's occur 

 in this book, and that dots are plentiful, and would be more plentiful 

 if it were customary to use the small "i" for the first personal pro- 

 noun that when it comes to dashes that's demonstrated: we're 

 Mayan. 



I suppose the tendency is to feel that we're sneering at some 

 valuable archaeologic work, and that Mr. Holder did make a veritable 

 identification. 



He writes: 



"I submitted the photographs to the Field Museum and the 

 Smithsonian and one or two others, and, to my surprise, the reply 

 was that they could make nothing out of it." 



Our indefinite acceptance, by preponderance of three or four 

 groups of museum-experts against one person, is that a stone bearing 

 inscriptions unassimilable with any known language upon this earth, 

 is said to have fallen from the sky. Another poor wretch of an 

 outcast belonging here is noted in the Scientific American, 48-261: 

 that, of an object, or a meteorite, that fell Feb. 16, 1883, near 

 Brescia, Italy, a false report was circulated that one of the frag- 



