low order, to have fallen in or with lightning.

Throughout this book, we class a great deal of science with bad fiction.
When is fiction bad, cheap, low? If coincidence is overworked. That's
one way of deciding. But with single writers coincidence seldom is
overworked: we find the excess in the subject at large. Such a writer as
the one of the _Cornhill Magazine_ tells us vaguely of beliefs of
peasants: there is no massing of instance after instance after instance.
Here ours will be the method of mass-formation.

Conceivably lightning may strike the ground near where there was a
wedge-shaped object in the first place: again and again and again:
lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in China; lightning
striking ground near wedge-shaped object in Scotland; lightning striking
ground near wedge-shaped object in Central Africa: coincidence in
France; coincidence in Java; coincidence in South America--

We grant a great deal but note a tendency to restlessness. Nevertheless
this is the psycho-tropism of science to all "thunderstones" said to
have fallen luminously.

As to greenstone, it is in the island of Jamaica, where the notion is
general that axes of a hard greenstone fall from the sky--"during the
rains." (_Jour. Inst. Jamaica_, 2-4.) Some other time we shall inquire
into this localization of objects of a specific material. "They are of a
stone nowhere else to be found in Jamaica." (_Notes and Queries_,
2-8-24.)

In my own tendency to exclude, or in the attitude of one peasant or
savage who thinks he is not to be classed with other peasants or
savages, I am not very much impressed with what natives think. It would
be hard to tell why. If the word of a Lord Kelvin carries no more
weight, upon scientific subjects, than the word of a Sitting Bull,
unless it be in agreement with conventional opinion--I think it must be
because savages have bad table manners. However, my snobbishness, in
this respect, loosens up somewhat before very widespread belief by
savages and peasants. And the notion of "thunderstones" is as wide as
geography itself.

The natives of Burma, China, Japan, according to Blinkenberg (_Thunder
Weapons_, p. 100)--not, of course, that Blinkenberg accepts one word of
it--think that carved stone objects have fallen from the sky, because
they think they have seen such objects fall from the sky. Such objects
are called "thunderbolts" in these countries. They are called
"thunderstones" in Morav