Page Content (OCR)
rated." [p. 155] "unimportant." 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- 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 "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.