ld be
excommunicated. So archaeologists, in their medieval dread of
excommunication, have tried to explain vitrified forts in terms of
terrestrial experience. We find in their insufficiencies the same old
assimilating of all that could be assimilated, and disregard for the
unassimilable, conventionalizing into the explanation that vitrified
forts were made by prehistoric peoples who built vast fires--often
remote from wood-supply--to melt externally, and to cement together, the
stones of their constructions. But negativeness always: so within itself
a science can never be homogeneous or unified or harmonious. So Miss
Russel, in the _Journal of the B.A.A._, has pointed out that it is
seldom that single stones, to say nothing of long walls, of large houses
that are burned to the ground, are vitrified.

If we pay a little attention to this subject, ourselves, before starting
to write upon it, which is one of the ways of being more nearly real
than oppositions so far encountered by us, we find:

That the stones of these forts are vitrified in no reference to
cementing them: that they are cemented here and there, in streaks, as if
special blasts had struck, or played, upon them.

Then one thinks of lightning?

Once upon a time something melted, in streaks, the stones of forts on
the tops of hills in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.

Lightning selects the isolated and conspicuous.

But some of the vitrified forts are not upon tops of hills: some are
very inconspicuous: their walls too are vitrified in streaks.

Something once had effect, similar to lightning, upon forts, mostly on
hills, in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia.

But upon hills, all over the rest of the world, are remains of forts
that are not vitrified.

There is only one crime, in the local sense, and that is not to turn
blue, if the gods are blue: but, in the universal sense, the one crime
is not to turn the gods themselves green, if you're green.

13

One of the most extraordinary of phenomena, or alleged phenomena, of
psychic research, or alleged research--if in quasi-existence there never
has been real research, but only approximations to research that merge
away, or that are continuous with, prejudice and convenience--

"Stone-throwing."

It's attributed to poltergeists. They're mischievous spirits.

Poltergeists do not assimilate with our own present quasi-system, which
is an attempt to correlate denied or disregar