a scientific man can't be desperate and reasonable too.

Or that a pickpocket, for instance, is safe, though caught with his hand
in one's pocket, if he's gloved, say: because no court in the land would
regard a gloved hand in the same way in which a bare hand would be
regarded.

That there's nothing but intermediateness to the rational and the
preposterous: that this status of our own ratiocinations is perceptible
wherein they are upon the unfamiliar.

Dr. Bodding collected 50 of these shaped stones, said to have fallen
from the sky, in the course of many years. He says that the Santals are
a highly developed race, and for ages have not used stone
implements--except in this one nefarious convenience to him.

All explanations are localizations. They fade away before the universal.
It is difficult to express that black rains in England do not originate
in the smoke of factories--less difficult to express that black rains of
South Africa do not. We utter little stress upon the absurdity of Dr.
Bedding's explanation, because, if anything's absurd everything's
absurd, or, rather, has in it some degree or aspect of absurdity, and
we've never had experience with any state except something somewhere
between ultimate absurdity and final reasonableness. Our acceptance is
that Dr. Bedding's elaborate explanation does not apply to cut-stone
objects found in tree trunks in other lands: we accept that for the
general, a local explanation is inadequate.

As to "thunderstones" not said to have fallen luminously, and not said
to have been found sticking in trees, we are told by faithful hypnotics
that astonished rustics come upon prehistoric axes that have been washed
into sight by rains, and jump to the conclusion that the things have
fallen from the sky. But simple rustics come upon many prehistoric
things: scrapers, pottery, knives, hammers. We have no record of
rusticity coming upon old pottery after a rain, reporting the fall of a
bowl from the sky.

Just now, my own acceptance is that wedge-shaped stone objects, formed
by means similar to human workmanship, have often fallen from the sky.
Maybe there are messages upon them. My acceptance is that they have been
called "axes" to discredit them: or the more familiar a term, the higher
the incongruity with vague concepts of the vast, remote, tremendous,
unknown.

In _Notes and Queries_, 2-8-92, a writer says that he had a
"thunderstone," which he had brought from Jamaica. The