ized archaeologist can do more than casually point out
resemblances, and merely suggest that strings of cup marks look like
messages, because--China, Switzerland, Algeria, America--if messages
they be, there seems to be no escape from attributing one origin to
them--then, if messages they be, I accept one external origin, to which
the whole surface of this earth was accessible, for them.

Something else that we emphasize:

That rows of cup marks have often been likened to footprints.

But, in this similitude, their unilinear arrangement must be
disregarded--of course often they're mixed up in every way, but
arrangement in single lines is very common. It is odd that they should
so often be likened to footprints: I suppose there are exceptional
cases, but unless it's something that hops on one foot, or a cat going
along a narrow fence-top, I don't think of anything that makes
footprints one directly ahead of another--Cop, in a station house,
walking a chalk line, perhaps.

Upon the Witch's Stone, near Ratho, Scotland, there are twenty-four
cups, varying in size from one and a half to three inches in diameter,
arranged in approximately straight lines. Locally it is explained that
these are tracks of dogs' feet (_Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotland_, 2-4-79).
Similar marks are scattered bewilderingly all around the Witch's
Stone--like a frenzy of telegraphing, or like messages repeating and
repeating, trying to localize differently.

In Inverness-shire, cup marks are called "fairies' footmarks." At
Valna's church, Norway, and St. Peter's, Ambleteuse, there are such
marks, said to be horses' hoofprints. The rocks of Clare, Ireland, are
marked with prints supposed to have been made by a mythical cow
(_Folklore_, 21-184).

We now have such a ghost of a thing that I'd not like to be interpreted
as offering it as a datum: it simply illustrates what I mean by the
notion of symbols, like cups, or like footprints, which, if like those
of horses or cows, are the reverse of, or the negatives of, cups--of
symbols that are regularly received somewhere upon this earth--steep,
conical hill, somewhere, I think--but that have often alighted in wrong
places--considerably to the mystification of persons waking up some
morning to find them upon formerly blank spaces.

An ancient record--still worse, an ancient Chinese record--of a
courtyard of a palace--dwellers of the palace waking up one morning,
finding the courtyard marked with tracks like