BOOK OF THE DAMNED 141 



ments bore the impress of a hand. That's all that is findable by me 

 upon this mere gasp of a thing. Intermediatistically, my acceptance 

 is that, though in the course of human history, there have been 

 some notable approximations, there never has been a real liar: that 

 he could not survive in intermediateness, where everything merges 

 away or has its pseudo-base in something else would be instantly 

 translated to the Negative Absolute. So my acceptance is that, 

 though curtly dismissed, there was something to base upon in this 

 report; that there were unusual markings upon this object. Of 

 course that is not to jump to the conclusion that they were cunei- 

 form characters that looked like finger prints. 



Altogether, I think that in some of our past expressions, we must 

 have been very efficient, if the experience of Mr. Symons be typical, 

 so indefinite are we becoming here. Just here we are interested 

 in many things that have been found, especially in the United States, 

 which speak of a civilization, or of many civilizations not indigenous 

 to this earth. One trouble is in trying to decide whether they fell 

 here from the sky, or were left behind by visitors from other worlds. 

 We have a notion that there have been disasters aloft, and that coins 

 have dropped here: that inhabitants of this earth found them or saw 

 them fall, and then made coins imitatively: it may be that coins 

 were showered here by something of a tutelary nature that under- 

 took to advance us from the stage of barter to the use of a medium. 

 If coins should be identified as Roman coins, weVe had so much 

 experience with "identifications" that we know a phantom when we 

 see one but, even so, how could Roman coins have got to North 

 America far in the interior of North America or buried under 

 the accumulation, of centuries, of soil unless they did drop from 

 wherever the first Romans came from? Ignatius Donnelly, in 

 "Atlantis," gives a list of objects that have been found in mounds 

 that are supposed to antedate all European influence in America: 

 lathe-made articles, such as traders from somewhere would sup- 

 ply to savages marks of the lathe said to be unmistakable. Said 

 to be: of course we can't accept that anything is unmistakable. 

 In the Rept. Smtthson. Inst., 1881-619, there is an account, by 

 Charles C. Jones, of two silver crosses that were found in Georgia. 

 They are skillfully made, highly ornamented crosses, but are not 

 conventional crucifixes: all arms of equal length. Mr. Jones is a 

 good positivist that De Sota had halted at the "precise" spot where 

 these crosses were found. But the spirit of negativeness that lurks 

 in all things said to be "precise" shows itself in that upon one of 



