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?