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[p. 149] The means of exclusion would probably be--men digging a hole--no one else looking: one of them drops a coin into the hole--as to where he got a strange coin, remarkable in shape even--that's disregarded. Up comes the coin--expressions of astonishment from the evil one who had dropped it. However, the antiquarians have missed this coin. | can find no other mention of it. Another coin. Also a little study in the genesis of a prophet. In the American Antiquarian, 16-313, is copied a story by a correspondent to the Detroit News, of a copper coin about the size of a two-cent piece, said to have been found in a Michigan mound. The Editor says merely that he does not endorse the find. Upon this slender basis, he buds out, in the next number of the Antiquarian: "The coin turns out, as we predicted, to be a fraud." You can imagine the scorn of Elijah, or any of the old more nearly real prophets. Or all things are tried by the only kind of jurisprudence we have in quasi-existence: Presumed to be innocent until convicted--but they're guilty. The Editor's reasoning is as phantom-like as my own, or St. Paul's, or Darwin's. The coin is condemned because it came from the same region from which, a few years before, had come pottery that had been called fraudulent. The pottery had been condemned because it was condemnable. Scientific American, June 17, 1882: