The Book of the Damned

In the attitude of Acceptance, our pseudo-base is: Cells of an embryo are in the reptilian era of the embryo; Some cells feel stimuli to take on new appearances. If it be of the design of the whole that the next era be mammalian, those cells that turn mammalian will be sustained against resistance, by inertia, of all the rest, and will be relatively right, though not finally right, because they, too, in time will have to give way to characters of other eras of higher development. If we are upon the verge of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown, it will avail thee not to call us base-born and frowsy peasants. In our crude, bucolic way, we now offer an outrage upon common sense that we think will some day be an unquestioned commonplace: That manufactured objects of stone and iron have fallen from the sky: That they have been brought down from a state of suspension, in a region of inertness to this earth's attraction, by atmospheric disturbances. The "thunderstone" is usually "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped piece of greenstone," says a writer in the Cornhill Magazine, 50-517. It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. Of course this writer says it's all superstition. Otherwise he'd be one of us crude and simple sons of the soil. Conventional damnation is that stone implements, already on the ground--"on the ground in the first place"--are found near where lightning was seen to strike: that are supposed by astonished rustics, or by intelligence of a low order, to have fallen in or with lightning.