description is of
a wedge-shaped object; not of an ax:

"It shows no mark of having been attached to a handle."

Of ten "thunderstones," figured upon different pages in Blinkenberg's
book, nine show no sign of ever having been attached to a handle: one is
perforated.

But in a report by Dr. C. Leemans, Director of the Leyden Museum of
Antiquities, objects, said by the Japanese to have fallen from the sky,
are alluded to throughout as "wedges." In the _Archaeologic Journal_,
11-118, in a paper upon the "thunderstones" of Java, the objects are
called "wedges" and not "axes."

Our notion is that rustics and savages call wedge-shaped objects that
fall from the sky, "axes": that scientific men, when it suits their
purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and adopt
the simple: that they can be intelligible when derisive.

All of which lands us in a confusion, worse, I think, than we were in
before we so satisfactorily emerged from the distresses of--butter and
blood and ink and paper and punk and silk. Now it's cannon balls and
axes and disks--if a "lapstone" be a disk--it's a flat stone, at any
rate.

A great many scientists are good impressionists: they snub the
impertinences of details. Had he been of a coarse, grubbing nature, I
think Dr. Bodding could never have so simply and beautifully explained
the occurrence of stone wedges in tree trunks. But to a realist, the
story would be something like this:

A man who needed a tree, in a land of jungles, where, for some unknown
reason, everyone's very selfish with his trees, conceives that hammering
stone wedges makes less noise than does the chopping of wood: he and his
descendants, in a course of many years, cut down trees with wedges, and
escape penalty, because it never occurs to a prosecutor that the head of
an ax is a wedge.

The story is like every other attempted positivism--beautiful and
complete, until we see what it excludes or disregards; whereupon it
becomes the ugly and incomplete--but not absolutely, because there is
probably something of what is called foundation for it. Perhaps a
mentally incomplete Santal did once do something of the kind. Story told
to Dr. Bodding: in the usual scientific way, he makes a dogma of an
aberration.

Or we did have to utter a little stress upon this matter, after all.
They're so hairy and attractive, these scientists of the 19th century.
We feel the zeal of a Sitting Bull when we think of their scal