lish--

Nevertheless I begin to suspect something else: something more subtle
and esoteric than graven characters upon stones that have fallen from
the sky, in attempts to communicate. The notion that other worlds are
attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion
is that it is not attempt at all--that it was achievement centuries ago.

I should like to send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen,
say, somewhere in New Hampshire--

And keep track of every person who came to examine that stone--trace
down his affiliations--keep track of him--

Then send out a report that a "thunderstone" had fallen at Stockholm,
say--

Would one of the persons who had gone to New Hampshire, be met again in
Stockholm? But--what if he had no anthropological, lapidarian, or
meteorological affiliations--but did belong to a secret society--

It is only a dawning credulity.

Of the three forms of symmetric objects that have, or haven't, fallen
from the sky, it seems to me that the disk is the most striking. So
far, in this respect, we have been at our worst--possibly that's pretty
bad--but "lapstones" are likely to be of considerable variety of form,
and something that is said to have fallen at sometime somewhere in the
Dutch West Indies is profoundly of the unchosen.

Now we shall have something that is high up in the castes of the
accursed:

_Comptes Rendus_, 1887-182:

That, upon June 20, 1887, in a "violent storm"--two months before the
reported fall of the symmetric iron object of Brixton--a small stone had
fallen from the sky at Tarbes, France: 13 millimeters in diameter; 5
millimeters thick; weight 2 grammes. Reported to the French Academy by
M. Sudre, professor of the Normal School, Tarbes.

This time the old convenience "there in the first place" is too greatly
resisted--the stone was covered with ice.

This object had been cut and shaped by means similar to human hands and
human mentality. It was a disk of worked stone--"tres regulier." "Il a
ete assurement travaille."

There's not a word as to any known whirlwind anywhere: nothing of other
objects or debris that fell at or near this date, in France. The thing
had fallen alone. But as mechanically as any part of a machine responds
to its stimulus, the explanation appears in _Comptes Rendus_ that this
stone had been raised by a whirlwind and then flung down.

It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important
than th