In an extraordinary approximation to fairness and justice, which is
permitted to us, because we are quite as desirous to make acceptable
that nothing can be proved as we are to sustain our own expressions, we
note:
That in _Notes and Queries_, 11-1-408, there is an account of an ancient
copper seal, about the size of a penny, found in chalk, at a depth of
from five to six feet, near Bredenstone, England. The design upon it is
said to be of a monk kneeling before a virgin and child: a legend upon
the margin is said to be: "St. Jordanis Monachi Spaldingie."
I don't know about that. It looks very desirable--undesirable to us.
There's a wretch of an ultra-frowsy thing in the _Scientific American_,
7-298, which we condemn ourselves, if somewhere, because of the oneness
of allness, the damned must also be the damning. It's a newspaper story:
that about the first of June, 1851, a powerful blast, near Dorchester,
Mass., cast out from a bed of solid rock a bell-shaped vessel of an
unknown metal: floral designs inlaid with silver; "art of some cunning
workman." The opinion of the Editor of the _Scientific American_ is that
the thing had been made by Tubal Cain, who was the first inhabitant of
Dorchester. Though I fear that this is a little arbitrary, I am not
disposed to fly rabidly at every scientific opinion.
_Nature_, 35-36:
A block of metal found in coal, in Austria, 1885. It is now in the
Salsburg museum.
This time we have another expression. Usually our intermediatist attack
upon provincial positivism is: Science, in its attempted positivism
takes something such as "true meteoritic material" as a standard of
judgment; but carbonaceous matter, except for its relative infrequency,
is just as veritable a standard of judgment; carbonaceous matter merges
away into such a variety of organic substances, that all standards are
reduced to indistinguishability: if, then, there is no real standard
against us, there is no real resistance to our own acceptances. Now our
intermediatism is: Science takes "true meteoritic material" as a
standard of admission; but now we have an instance that quite as truly
makes "true meteoritic material" a standard of exclusion; or, then, a
thing that denies itself is no real resistance to our own
acceptances--this depending upon whether we have a datum of something of
"true meteoritic material" that orthodoxy can never accept fell from the
sky.
We're a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a carved,
geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates human
life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an indigenous
product of this earth: but we're quite as much interested in the dilemma
it made for the faithful.
It is of "true meteoritic material." _L'Astronomie_, 1887-114, it is
said that, though so geometric, its phenomena so characteristic of
meteorites exclude the idea that it was the work of man.
As to the deposit--Tertiary coal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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