of attention."

The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it
with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in
Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius--

Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have
been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth's surface by
whirlwinds or by volcanic action.

It's more than one hundred and twenty years later. I know of no aerolite
that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.

Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that
held out for exclusion of outside forces.

One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to
analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses,
or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era.

We believe no more.

We accept.

Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be
abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of
damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times
some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball,
continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that
nothing could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled
up from some other part of this earth's surface.

It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's
intermediate to the commendable and the censurable.

It's virginal.

Meteorites, data of which were once of the damned, have been admitted,
but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted
exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic
and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel--

Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.

We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept
and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:

There in the first place;

Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.

As late as November, 1902, in _Nature Notes_, 13-231, a member of the
Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky;
that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that
attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a
falling, luminous object--

By progress we mean rape.

Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon
it.