It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields, and that
scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms. We cannot take
for a real base that, as to phenomena with which they are more
familiar, peasants are more likely to be right than are scientists: a
host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against
us.
I should say that our "existence" is like a bridge--except that that
comparison is in static terms--but like the Brooklyn Bridge, upon which
multitudes of bugs are seeking a fundamental--coming to a girder that
seems firm and final--but the girder is built upon supports. A support
then seems final. But it is built upon underlying structures. Nothing
final can be found in all the bridge, because the bridge itself is not a
final thing in itself, but is a relationship between Manhattan and
Brooklyn. If our "existence" is a relationship between the Positive
Absolute and the Negative Absolute, the quest for finality in it is
hopeless: everything in it must be relative, if the "whole" is not a
whole, but is, itself, a relation.
In the attitude of Acceptance, our pseudo-base is:
Cells of an embryo are in the reptilian era of the embryo;
Some cells feel stimuli to take on new appearances.
If it be of the design of the whole that the next era be mammalian,
those cells that turn mammalian will be sustained against resistance, by
inertia, of all the rest, and will be relatively right, though not
finally right, because they, too, in time will have to give way to
characters of other eras of higher development.
If we are upon the verge of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be
overthrown, it will avail thee not to call us base-born and frowsy
peasants.
In our crude, bucolic way, we now offer an outrage upon common sense
that we think will some day be an unquestioned commonplace:
That manufactured objects of stone and iron have fallen from the sky:
That they have been brought down from a state of suspension, in a region
of inertness to this earth's attraction, by atmospheric disturbances.
The "thunderstone" is usually "a beautifully polished, wedge-shaped
piece of greenstone," says a writer in the _Cornhill Magazine_, 50-517.
It isn't: it's likely to be of almost any kind of stone, but we call
attention to the skill with which some of them have been made. Of
course this writer says it's all superstition. Otherwise he'd be one of
us crude and simple sons of the soil.
Conventional damnation is that stone implements, already on the
ground--"on the ground in the first place"--are found near where
lightning was seen to strike: that are supposed by astonished rustics,
or by intelligence of a low order, to have fallen in or with lightning.
Throughout this book, we class a great deal of science with bad fiction.
When is fiction bad, cheap, low? If coincidence is overworked. That's
one way of deciding. But with single writers coincidence seldom is
overworked: we find the excess in the subject at large. Such a writer as
the one of the _Cornhill Magazine_ tells us vaguely of beliefs of
peasants: there is no massing of instance after instance after instance.
Here ours will be the method of mass-formation.
Conceivably lightning may strike the ground near where there was a
wedge-shaped object in the first place: again and again and again:
lightning striking ground near wedge-shaped object in China; lightning
striking ground near wedge-shaped object in Scotland; lightning striking
ground near wedge-shaped object in Central Africa: coincidence in
France; coincidence in Java; coincidence in South America--
We grant a great deal but note a tendency to restlessness. Nevertheless
this is the psycho-tropism of science to all "thunderstones" said to
have fallen luminously.
As to greenstone, it is in the island of Jamaica, where the notion is
general that axes of a hard greenstone fall from the sky--"during the
rains." (_Jour. Inst. Jamaica_, 2-4.) Some other time we shall inquire
into this localization of objects of a specific material. "They are of a
stone nowhere else to be found in Jamaica." (_Notes and Queries_,
2-8-24.)
In my own tendency to exclude, or in the attitude of one peasant or
savage who thinks he is not to be classed with other peasants or
savages, I am not very much impressed with what natives think. It would
be hard to tell why. If the word of a Lord Kelvin carries no more
weight, upon scientific subjects, than the word of a Sitting Bull,
unless it be in agreement with conventional opinion--I think it must be
because savages have bad table manners. However, my snobbishness, in
this respect, loosens up somewhat before very widespread belief by
savages and peasants. And the notion of "thunderstones" is as wide as
geography itself.
The natives of Burma, China, Japan, according to Blinkenberg (_Thunder
Weapons_, p. 100)--not, of course, that Blinkenberg accepts one word of
it--think that carved stone objects have fallen from the sky, because
they think they have seen such objects fall from the sky. Such objects
are called "thunderbolts" in these countries. They are called
"thunderstones" in Moravia, Holland, Belgium, France, Cambodia, Sumatra,
and Siberia. They're called "storm stones" in Lausitz; "sky arrows" in
Slavonia; "thunder axes" in England and Scotland; "lightning stones" in
Spain and Portugal; "sky axes" in Greece; "lightning flashes" in Brazil;
"thunder teeth" in Amboina.
The belief is as widespread as is belief in ghosts and witches, which
only the superstitious deny today.
As to beliefs by North American Indians, Tyler gives a list of
references (_Primitive Culture_, 2-237). As to South American
Indians--"Certain stone hatchets are said to have fallen from the
heavens." (_Jour. Amer. Folk Lore_, 17-203.)
If you, too, revolt against coincidence after coincidence after
coincidence, but find our interpretation of "thunderstones" just a
little too strong or rich for digestion, we recommend the explanation of
one, Tallius, written in 1649:
"The naturalists say they are generated in the sky by fulgurous
exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumfused humor."
Of course the paper in the _Cornhill Magazine_ was written with no
intention of trying really to investigate this subject, but to deride
the notion that worked-stone objects have ever fallen from the sky. A
writer in the _Amer. Jour. Sci._, 1-21-325, read this paper and thinks
it remarkable "that any man of ordinary reasoning powers should write a
paper to prove that thunderbolts do not exist."