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The Book of the Damned
·
Charles Fort
149
Our
notion
is
that
rustics
and
savages
call
wedge-shaped
objects
that
fall
from
the
sky,
"axes":
that
scientific
men,
when
it
suits
their
purposes,
can
resist
temptations
to
prolixity
and
pedantry,
and
adopt
the
simple:
that
they
can
be
intelligible
when
derisive.
All
of
which
lands
us
in
a
confusion,
worse,
I
think,
than
we
were
in
before
we
so
satisfactorily
emerged
from
the
distresses
of--butter
and
blood
and
ink
and
paper
and
punk
and
silk.
Now
it's
cannon
balls
and
axes
and
disks--if
a
"lapstone"
be
a
disk--it's
a
flat
stone,
at
any
rate.
A
great
many
scientists
are
good
impressionists:
they
snub
the
impertinences
of
details.
Had
he
been
of
a
coarse,
grubbing
nature,
I
think
Dr.
Bodding
could
never
have
so
simply
and
beautifully
explained
the
occurrence
of
stone
wedges
in
tree
trunks.
But
to
a
realist,
the
story
would
be
something
like
this:
A
man
who
needed
a
tree,
in
a
land
of
jungles,
where,
for
some
unknown
reason,
everyone's
very
selfish
with
his
trees,
conceives
that
hammering
stone
wedges
makes
less
noise
than
does
the
chopping
of
wood:
he
and
his
descendants,
in
a
course
of
many
years,
cut
down
trees
with
wedges,
and
escape
penalty,
because
it
never
occurs
to
a
prosecutor
that
the
head
of
an
ax
is
a
wedge.
The
story
is
like
every
other
attempted
positivism--beautiful
and
complete,
until
we
see
what
it
excludes
or
disregards;
whereupon
it
becomes
the
ugly
and
incomplete--but
not
absolutely,
because
there
is
probably
something
of
what
is
called
foundation
for
it.
Perhaps
a
mentally
incomplete
Santal
did
once
do
something
of
the
kind.
Story
told
to
Dr.
Bodding:
in
the
usual
scientific
way,
he
makes
a
dogma
of
an
aberration.
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