The Book of the Damned

So the fight of the exclusionists to maintain the traditional—or to prevent abrupt transition from the quasi-established—fighting so that here, more than a century after meteorites were included, no other notable inclusion has been made, except that of cosmic dust, data of which Nordenskiold made more nearly real than data in opposition.

So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the preposterous, against Sir W. H. Thomson's notions of arrival upon this earth of organisms on meteorites—

"I can only regard it as a jest" (Knowledge, 1-302).

Or that there is nothing but jest—or something intermediate to jest and tragedy;

That ours is not an existence but an utterance;

That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive—like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist—

That Momus is imagining us and our arts and sciences and religions, and is narrating or picturing us as a satire upon the gods’ real existence.

Because—with many of our data of coal that has fallen from the sky as accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific pronouncement that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, by which we mean a consistent existence, or a state in which there is real intelligence, or a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably merge away with imbecility, could there have been such a row as that which was raised about forty years ago over Dr. Hahn's announcement that he had found fossils in meteorites?

Accessible to anybody at that time:

Philosophical Magazine, 4-17-425:

That the substance that fell at Kaba, Hungary, April 15, 1857, contained organic matter "analagous to fossil waxes."

Or limestone:

Of the block of limestone which was reported to have fallen at Middleburg, Florida, it is said (Science, 11-118) that, though something had been seen to fall in "an old cultivated field," the witnesses

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