."

Mr. Holder says that he recognized familiar Mayan symbols in the
inscription. His method was the usual method by which anything can be
"identified" as anything else: that is to pick out whatever is agreeable
and disregard the rest. He says that he has demonstrated that most of
the symbols are Mayan. One of our intermediatist pseudo-principles is
that any way of demonstrating anything is just as good a way of
demonstrating anything else. By Mr. Holder's method we could demonstrate
that we're Mayan--if that should be a source of pride to us. One of the
characters upon this stone is a circle within a circle--similar
character found by Mr. Holder is a Mayan manuscript. There are two 6's.
6's can be found in Mayan manuscripts. A double scroll. There are dots
and there are dashes. Well, then, we, in turn, disregard the circle
within a circle and the double scroll and emphasize that 6's occur in
this book, and that dots are plentiful, and would be more plentiful if
it were customary to use the small "i" for the first personal
pronoun--that when it comes to dashes--that's demonstrated: we're Mayan.

I suppose the tendency is to feel that we're sneering at some valuable
archaeologic work, and that Mr. Holder did make a veritable
identification.

He writes:

"I submitted the photographs to the Field Museum and the Smithsonian and
one or two others, and, to my surprise, the reply was that they could
make nothing out of it."

Our indefinite acceptance, by preponderance of three or four groups of
museum-experts against one person, is that a stone bearing inscriptions
unassimilable with any known language upon this earth, is said to have
fallen from the sky. Another poor wretch of an outcast belonging here is
noted in the _Scientific American_, 48-261: that, of an object, or a
meteorite, that fell Feb. 16, 1883, near Brescia, Italy, a false report
was circulated that one of the fragments bore the impress of a hand.
That's all that is findable by me upon this mere gasp of a thing.
Intermediatistically, my acceptance is that, though in the course of
human history, there have been some notable approximations, there never
has been a real liar: that he could not survive in intermediateness,
where everything merges away or has its pseudo-base in something
else--would be instantly translated to the Negative Absolute. So my
acceptance is that, though curtly dismissed, there was something to base
upon in this report; that there were