probably" as
bad positivism. As to the "men of position," who had accepted that this
thing had fallen from the sky--"I have now obliged them to admit their
mistake," says Dr. Johnstone-Lavis--or it's always the stranger in
Naples who knows La Scala lava better than the natives know it.

Explanation:

That the thing had been knocked from, or thrown from, a roof.

As to attempt to trace the occurrence to any special roof--nothing said
upon that subject. Or that Dr. Johnstone-Lavis called a carved stone a
"lapstone," quite as Mr. Symons called a spherical object a "cannon
ball": bent upon a discrediting incongruity:

Shoemaking and celestiality.

It is so easy to say that axes, or wedge-shaped stones found on the
ground, were there in the first place, and that it is only coincidence
that lightning should strike near one--but the credibility of
coincidences decreases as the square root of their volume, I think. Our
massed instances speak too much of coincidences of coincidences. But the
axes, or wedge-shaped objects that have been found in trees, are more
difficult for orthodoxy. For instance, Arago accepts that such finds
have occurred, but he argues that, if wedge-shaped stones have been
found in tree trunks, so have toads been found in tree trunks--did the
toads fall there?

Not at all bad for a hypnotic.

Of course, in our acceptance, the Irish are the Chosen People. It's
because they are characteristically best in accord with the underlying
essence of quasi-existence. M. Arago answers a question by asking
another question. That's the only way a question can be answered in our
Hibernian kind of an existence.

Dr. Bodding argued with the natives of the Santal Parganas, India, who
said that cut and shaped stones had fallen from the sky, some of them
lodging in tree trunks. Dr. Bodding, with orthodox notions of velocity
of falling bodies, having missed, I suppose, some of the notes I have
upon large hailstones, which, for size, have fallen with astonishingly
low velocity, argued that anything falling from the sky would be
"smashed to atoms." He accepts that objects of worked stone have been
found in tree trunks, but he explains:

That the Santals often steal trees, but do not chop them down in the
usual way, because that would be to make too much noise: they insert
stone wedges, and hammer them instead: then, if they should be caught,
wedges would not be the evidence against them that axes would be.

Or that