The Book of the Damned

We're making excuses for them. Really--as it were--you know, we're not quite so damned as we were. One does not apologize for the gods and at the same time feel quite utterly prostrate before them. If this were a real existence, and all of us real persons, with real standards to judge by, I'm afraid we'd have to be a little severe with some of these Mr. Symonses. As it is, of course, seriousness seems out of place. We note an amusing little touch in the indefinite allusion to "a man," who with his un-named family, had "considered" that he had seen a stone fall. The "man" was the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, who was well-known in his day. The next instance was reported by W.B. Tripp, F.R.M.S.--that, during a thunderstorm, a farmer had seen the ground in front of him plowed up by something that was luminous. Dug. Bronze ax. My own notion is that an expedition to the North Pole could not be so urgent as that representative scientists should have gone to that farmer and there spent a summer studying this one reported occurrence. As it is--un-named farmer--somewhere--no date. The thing must stay damned. Another specimen for our museum is a comment in Nature upon these objects: that they are "of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of terrestrial, and not a celestial, character." Just why celestiality, or that of it which, too, is only of Intermediateness should not be quite as amusing as terrestriality is beyond our reasoning powers, which we have agreed are not ordinary. Of course there is nothing amusing about wedges and spheres at all--or Archimedes and Euclid are humorists. It is that they were described derisively. If you'd like a little specimen of the standardization of orthodox opinion--