is a
kind of plagiarism: we got it from the geologists, who demonstrate by
this reasoning the foreign origin of erratics. We fear we're a little
gross and scientific at times.

But it's my acceptance that a great deal of scientific literature must
be read between the lines. It's not everyone who has the lamentableness
of a Sir John Evans. Just as a great deal of Voltaire's meaning was
inter-linear, we suspect that a Captain Duff merely hints rather than
to risk having a Prof. Lawrence Smith fly at him and call him "a
half-insane man." Whatever Captain Duff's meaning may have been, and
whether he smiled like a Voltaire when he wrote it, Captain Duff writes
of "the extremely soft nature of the stone, rendering it equally useless
as an offensive or defensive weapon."

Story, by a correspondent, in _Nature_, 34-53, of a Malay, of
"considerable social standing"--and one thing about our data is that,
damned though they be, they do so often bring us into awful good
company--who knew of a tree that had been struck, about a month before,
by something in a thunderstorm. He searched among the roots of this tree
and found a "thunderstone." Not said whether he jumped or leaped to the
conclusion that it had fallen: process likely to be more leisurely in
tropical countries. Also I'm afraid his way of reasoning was not very
original: just so were fragments of the Bath-furnace meteorite, accepted
by orthodoxy, discovered.

We shall now have an unusual experience. We shall read of some reports
of extraordinary circumstances that were investigated by a man of
science--not of course that they were really investigated by him, but
that his phenomena occupied a position approximating higher to real
investigation than to utter neglect. Over and over we read of
extraordinary occurrences--no discussion; not even a comment afterward
findable; mere mention occasionally--burial and damnation.

The extraordinary and how quickly it is hidden away.

Burial and damnation, or the obscurity of the conspicuous.

We did read of a man who, in the matter of snails, did travel some
distance to assure himself of something that he had suspected in
advance; and we remember Prof. Hitchcock, who had only to smite Amherst
with the wand of his botanical knowledge, and lo! two fungi sprang up
before night; and we did read of Dr. Gray and his thousands of fishes
from one pailful of water--but these instances stand out; more
frequently there was no "investigati