one best. I have such a vivid impression from it of
someone polishing up brass or something, and in an awful hurry. Of
course the third is more dramatic--still they're all very good. They are
perturbations of one another, I suppose.

In Tract 44, Col. Whittelsey returns to the subject. He gives the
conclusion of Major De Helward, at the Congress of Luxembourg, 1877:

"If Prof. Read and myself are right in the conclusion that the figures
are neither of the Runic, Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Lybian,
Celtic, or any other alphabet-language, its importance has been greatly
over-rated."

Obvious to a child; obvious to any mentality not helplessly subjected to
a system:

That just therein lies the importance of this object.

It is said that an ideal of science is to find out the new--but, unless
a thing be of the old, it is "unimportant."

"It is not worth while." (Hovey.)

Then the inscribed ax, or wedge, which, according to Dr. John C. Evans,
in a communication to the American Ethnological Society, was plowed up,
near Pemberton, N.J., 1859. The characters upon this ax, or wedge, are
strikingly similar to the characters on the Grave Creek stone. Also,
with a little disregard here and a little more there, they look like
tracks in the snow by someone who's been out celebrating, or like your
handwriting, or mine, when we think there's a certain distinction in
illegibility. Method of disregard: anything's anything.

Dr. Abbott describes this object in the _Report of the Smithsonian
Institution_, 1875-260.

He says he has no faith in it.

All progress is from the outrageous to the commonplace. Or
quasi-existence proceeds from rape to the crooning of lullabies. It's
been interesting to me to go over various long-established periodicals
and note controversies between attempting positivists and then
intermediatistic issues. Bold, bad intruders of theories; ruffians with
dishonorable intentions--the alarms of Science; her attempts to preserve
that which is dearer than life itself--submission--then a fidelity like
Mrs. Micawber's. So many of these ruffians, or wandering comedians that
were hated, or scorned, pitied, embraced, conventionalized. There's not
a notion in this book that has a more frightful, or ridiculous, mien
than had the notion of human footprints in rocks, when that now
respectabilized ruffian, or clown, was first heard from. It seems
bewildering to one whose interests are not scientific that such rows