The Book of the Damned

Except--that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my disposition 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 Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have been found. A race of tiny beings. They crucified cockroaches. Exquisite beings--but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their diminutive way they were human beings. They crucified. The "fairy crosses," we are told in Harper's Weekly, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in the Scientific American, 79-395, that some of them are no larger than the head of a pin. They have been found in two other states, but all in Virginia are strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain. We are reminded of the Chinese seals in Ireland. I suppose they fell there. Some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese. This time we are spared contact with the anthropologists and have geologists instead, but I am afraid that the relief to our finer, or more nearly real, sensibilities will not be very great. The geologists were called upon to explain the "fairy crosses." Their response was the usual scientific tropism--"Geologists say that they are crystals." The writer in Harper's Weekly points out that this "hold up," or this anaesthetic, if theoretic science be little but attempt to assuage pangs of the unexplained, fails to account for the localized distributions of these objects--which make me think of both aggregation and separation at the bottom of the sea, if from a wrecked ship, similar objects should fall in large numbers but at different times.