ve this delusion, but we suspect that the
date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity
all day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn
that some of the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a
field"--"found in making a road"--"turned up by the plow" occurs a dozen
times. Someone fishing in Lake Okeechobee, brought up an object in his
fishing net. No meteorite had ever been seen to fall near it. The U.S.
National Museum accepts it.

If we have accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic
material"--one instance of "carbonaceous" matter--if it be too difficult
to utter the word "coal"--we see that in this inclusion-exclusion, as in
every other means of forming an opinion, false inclusion and false
exclusion have been practiced by curators of museums.

There is something of ultra-pathos--of cosmic sadness--in this universal
search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by
either inspiration or analysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham
of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown--or renewed hope
and search for the special that can be true, or for something local that
could also be universal. It's as if "true meteoritic material" were a
"rock of ages" to some scientific men. They cling. But clingers cannot
hold out welcoming arms.

The only seemingly conclusive utterance, or seemingly substantial thing
to cling to, is a product of dishonesty, ignorance, or fatigue. All
sciences go back and back, until they're worn out with the process, or
until mechanical reaction occurs: then they move forward--as it were.
Then they become dogmatic, and take for bases, positions that were only
points of exhaustion. So chemistry divided and sub-divided down to
atoms; then, in the essential insecurity of all quasi-constructions, it
built up a system, which, to anyone so obsessed by his own hypnoses that
he is exempt to the chemist's hypnoses, is perceptibly enough an
intellectual anaemia built upon infinitesimal debilities.

In _Science_, n.s., 31-298, E.D. Hovey, of the American Museum of
Natural History, asserts or confesses that often have objects of
material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him He
says that these things have been accompanied by assurances that they
have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses.

They are all excluded. They are not of true meteoritic material. They
were on the ground