offering
anything as a positive fact. Rather often we have not the delusion that
we're any less superstitious and credulous than any logician, savage,
curator, or rustic.

An orthodox demonstration, in terms of which we shall have some
heresies, is that if things found in coal could have got there only by
falling there--they fell there.

So, in the _Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc. Mems._, 2-9-306, it is argued
that certain roundish stones that have been found in coal are "fossil
aerolites": that they had fallen from the sky, ages ago, when the coal
was soft, because the coal had closed around them, showing no sign of
entrance.

_Proc. Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland_, 1-1-121:

That, in a lump of coal, from a mine in Scotland, an iron instrument had
been found--

"The interest attaching to this singular relic arises from the fact of
its having been found in the heart of a piece of coal, seven feet under
the surface."

If we accept that this object of iron was of workmanship beyond the
means and skill of the primitive men who may have lived in Scotland when
coal was forming there--

"The instrument was considered to be modern."

That our expression has more of realness, or higher approximation to
realness, than has the attempt to explain that is made in the
_Proceedings_:

That in modern times someone may have bored for coal, and that his drill
may have broken off in the coal it had penetrated.

Why he should have abandoned such easily accessible coal, I don't know.
The important point is that there was no sign of boring: that this
instrument was in a lump of coal that had closed around it so that its
presence was not suspected, until the lump of coal was broken.

No mention can I find of this damned thing in any other publication. Of
course there is an alternative here: the thing may not have fallen from
the sky: if in coal-forming times, in Scotland, there were, indigenous
to this earth, no men capable of making such an iron instrument, it may
have been left behind by visitors from other worlds.

In an extraordinary approximation to fairness and justice, which is
permitted to us, because we are quite as desirous to make acceptable
that nothing can be proved as we are to sustain our own expressions, we
note:

That in _Notes and Queries_, 11-1-408, there is an account of an ancient
copper seal, about the size of a penny, found in chalk, at a depth of
from five to six feet, near Bredenstone, England. The desi