I 5 8 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



apples to other systems: so Prof. Marsh, a loyal and unscrupulous 

 systematist, argues: 



"The size of these footprints and specially the width between the 

 right and left series, are strong evidence that they were not made by 

 men, as has been so generally supposed." 



So these excluders. Stranglers of Minerva. Desperadoes of dis- 

 regard. Above all, or below all, the anthropologists. I'm inspired 

 with a new insult some one offends me: I wish to express almost 

 absolute contempt for him he's a systematistic anthropologist. 

 Simply to read something of this kind is not so impressive as to see 

 for one's self: if any one will take the trouble to look up these foot- 

 prints, as pictured in the Journal, he will either agree with Prof. 

 Marsh or feel that to deny them is to indicate a mind as profoundly 

 enslaved by a system as was ever the humble intellect of a medieval 

 monk. The reasoning of this representative phantom of the chosen, 

 or of the spectral appearances who sit in judgment, or condemnation, 

 upon us of the more nearly real: 



That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic 

 footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not 

 giants. 



We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of course 

 Stonehenge, for instance. It may be that, as time goes on, we 

 shall have to admit that there are remains of many tremendous hab- 

 itation of giants upon this earth, and that their appearances here 

 were more than casual but their bones or the absence of their 



Except that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my dis- 

 position may be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural 

 History, dark cynicisms arise the moment I come to the fossils or 

 old bones that have been found upon this earth gigantic things 

 that have been reconstructed into terrifying but "proper" dinosaurs 

 but my uncheerfulness 



The dodo did it. 



On one of the floors below the fossils, they have a reconstructed 

 dodo. It's frankly a fiction: it's labeled as such but it's been 

 reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly 



Fairies. 



"Fairy crosses." 



Harper's Weekly, 50-715: 



That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny 



