is occurred. In _La Nature_, 1887, and in _L'Annee Scientifique_,
1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer
numbers of _Nature_, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the _Annuaire
de Soc. Met._, 1887.

Not a word of discussion.

Not a subsequent mention can I find.

Our own expression:

What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may
explain?

A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20,
1887.

9

My own pseudo-conclusion:

That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific
principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little
harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets
of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes
have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all
clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that
pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot
distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have
visited upon us their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and
skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived
from conveniences.

Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit they're the
accursed.

If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of
dream-phantasms.

Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is
considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be
accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky--as if
in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the
essence of everything, or in the merging away of everything into
something else, there could be anything that could be accounted for in
only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason that if something
can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted for in that
way--or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it imposes, but,
of course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be found in
quasi-existence. In our acceptance, logic, science, art, religion are,
in our "existence," premonitions of a coming awakening, like dawning
awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer.

Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of "true
meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may seem incredible
that modern curators still ha