The only seemingly conclusive utterance, or seemingly substantial thing to cling to, is a product of dishonesty, ignorance, or fatigue. All sciences go back and back, until they're worn out with the process, or until mechanical reaction occurs: then they move forward--as it were. Then they become dogmatic, and take for bases, positions that were only points of exhaustion. So chemistry divided and sub-divided down to atoms; then, in the essential insecurity of all quasi-constructions, it built up a system, which, to anyone so obsessed by his own hypnoses that he is exempt to the chemist's hypnoses, is perceptibly enough an intellectual anaemia built upon infinitesimal debilities. In _Science_, n.s., 31-298, E.D. Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, asserts or confesses that often have objects of material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him He says that these things have been accompanied by assurances that they have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses. They are all excluded. They are not of true meteoritic material. They were on the ground in the first place. It is only by coincidence that lightning has struck, or that a real meteorite, which was unfindable, has struck near objects of slag and limestone. Mr. Hovey says that the list might be extended indefinitely. That's a tantalizing suggestion of some very interesting stuff-- He says: "But it is not worth while." I'd like to know what strange, damned, excommunicated things have been sent to museums by persons who have felt convinced that they had seen what they may have seen, strongly enough to risk ridicule, to make up bundles, go to express offices, and write letters. I accept that over the door of every museum, into which such things enter, is written: "Abandon Hope." If a Mr. Symons mentions one instance of coal, or of slag or cinders, said to have fallen from the sky, we are not--except by association with the "carbonaceous" meteorites--strong in our impression that coal sometimes falls to this earth from coal-burning super-constructions up somewhere-- In _Comptes Rendus_, 91-197, M. Daubree tells the same story. Our acceptance, then, is that other curators could tell this same story. Then the phantomosity of our impression substantiates proportionately to its multiplicity. M. Daubree says that often have strange damned things been sent to the French museums, accompanied by assurances that they had been seen to fall from the sky. Especially to our interest, he mentions coal and slag. Excluded. Buried un-named and undated in Science's potter's field.