The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

Page 26 of 376

Page 26 of 376
The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort-pages

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forces. [p. 21] We accept. It's virginal. It's more than one hundred and twenty years later. | know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin. Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that held out for exclusion of outside One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses, or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era. We believe no more. Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball, continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that nothing could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled up from some other part of this earth's surface. It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which | mean it's intermediate to the commendable and the censurable. Meteorites, data of which were once of the damned, have been admitted, but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel--