"The grave of one who was assassinated here. May God, to revenge him,
strike his murderer, cutting off the hand of his existence."
I like the first one best. I have such a vivid impression from it of
someone polishing up brass or something, and in an awful hurry. Of
course the third is more dramatic--still they're all very good. They are
perturbations of one another, I suppose.
In Tract 44, Col. Whittelsey returns to the subject. He gives the
conclusion of Major De Helward, at the Congress of Luxembourg, 1877:
"If Prof. Read and myself are right in the conclusion that the figures
are neither of the Runic, Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Lybian,
Celtic, or any other alphabet-language, its importance has been greatly
over-rated."
Obvious to a child; obvious to any mentality not helplessly subjected to
a system:
That just therein lies the importance of this object.
It is said that an ideal of science is to find out the new--but, unless
a thing be of the old, it is "unimportant."
"It is not worth while." (Hovey.)
Then the inscribed ax, or wedge, which, according to Dr. John C. Evans,
in a communication to the American Ethnological Society, was plowed up,
near Pemberton, N.J., 1859. The characters upon this ax, or wedge, are
strikingly similar to the characters on the Grave Creek stone. Also,
with a little disregard here and a little more there, they look like
tracks in the snow by someone who's been out celebrating, or like your
handwriting, or mine, when we think there's a certain distinction in
illegibility. Method of disregard: anything's anything.
Dr. Abbott describes this object in the _Report of the Smithsonian
Institution_, 1875-260.
He says he has no faith in it.
All progress is from the outrageous to the commonplace. Or
quasi-existence proceeds from rape to the crooning of lullabies. It's
been interesting to me to go over various long-established periodicals
and note controversies between attempting positivists and then
intermediatistic issues. Bold, bad intruders of theories; ruffians with
dishonorable intentions--the alarms of Science; her attempts to preserve
that which is dearer than life itself--submission--then a fidelity like
Mrs. Micawber's. So many of these ruffians, or wandering comedians that
were hated, or scorned, pitied, embraced, conventionalized. There's not
a notion in this book that has a more frightful, or ridiculous, mien
than had the notion of human footprints in rocks, when that now
respectabilized ruffian, or clown, was first heard from. It seems
bewildering to one whose interests are not scientific that such rows
should be raised over such trifles: but the feeling of a systematist
toward such an intruder is just about what anyone's would be if a tramp
from the street should come in, sit at one's dinner table, and say he
belonged there. We know what hypnosis can do: let him insist with all
his might that he does belong there, and one begins to suspect that he
may be right; that he may have higher perceptions of what's right. The
prohibitionists had this worked out very skillfully.
So the row that was raised over the stone from Grave Creek--but time and
cumulativeness, and the very factor we make so much of--or the power of
massed data. There were other reports of inscribed stones, and then,
half a century later, some mounds--or caches, as we call them--were
opened by the Rev. Mr. Gass, near the city of Davenport. (_American
Antiquarian_, 15-73.) Several stone tablets were found. Upon one of
them, the letters "TFTOWNS" may easily be made out. In this instance we
hear nothing of fraudulency--time, cumulativeness, the power of massed
data. The attempt to assimilate this datum is:
That the tablet was probably of Mormon origin.
Why?
Because, at Mendon, Ill., was found a brass plate, upon which were
similar characters.
Why that?