e American Antiquarian Society. "... 8 and other
hieroglyphics are upon this tablet." This time, also, fraud is not
mentioned. My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike ever to
mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way. Anything that
assimilates with one explanation, must have assimilable relations, to
some degree, with all other explanations, if all explanations are
somewhere continuous. Mormons are lugged in again, but the attempt is
faint and helpless--"because general circumstances make it difficult to
explain the presence of these tablets."

Altogether our phantom resistance is mere attribution to the Mormons,
without the slightest attempt to find base for the attribution. We think
of messages that were showered upon this earth, and of messages that
were cached in mounds upon this earth. The similarity to the Franklin
situation is striking. Conceivably centuries from now, objects dropped
from relief-expedition-balloons may be found in the Arctic, and
conceivably there are still undiscovered caches left by Franklin, in the
hope that relief expeditions would find them. It would be as incongruous
to attribute these things to the Eskimos as to attribute tablets and
lettered stones to the aborigines of America. Some time I shall take up
an expression that the queer-shaped mounds upon this earth were built by
explorers from Somewhere, unable to get back, designed to attract
attention from some other world, and that a vast sword-shaped mound has
been discovered upon the moon--Just now we think of lettered things and
their two possible significances.

A bizarre little lost soul, rescued from one of the morgues of the
_American Journal of Science_:

An account, sent by a correspondent, to Prof. Silliman, of something
that was found in a block of marble, taken November, 1829, from a
quarry, near Philadelphia (_Am. J. Sci._, 1-19-361). The block was cut
into slabs. By this process, it is said, was exposed an indentation in
the stone, about one and a half inches by five-eighths of an inch. A
geometric indentation: in it were two definite-looking raised letters,
like "I U": only difference is that the corners of the "U" are not
rounded, but are right angles. We are told that this block of stone came
from a depth of seventy or eighty feet--or that, if acceptable, this
lettering was done long, long ago. To some persons, not sated with the
commonness of the incredible that has to be accepted, it may seem
g