Other tablets were found. Upon one of them are two "F's" and two "8's." Also a large tablet, twelve inches by eight to ten inches "with Roman numerals and Arabic." It is said that the figure "8" occurs three times, and the figure or letter "O" seven times. "With these familiar characters are others that resemble ancient alphabets, either Phœnecian or Hebrew."
It may be that the discovery of Australia, for instance, will turn out to be less important than the discovery and the meaning of these tablets—
But where will you read of them in anything subsequently published; what antiquarian has ever since tried to understand them, and their presence, and indications of antiquity, in a land that we're told was inhabited only by unlettered savages?
These things that are exhumed only to be buried in some other way.
Another tablet was found, at Davenport, by Mr. Charles Harrison, president of the American Antiquarian Society. "... 8 and other hieroglyphics are upon this tablet." This time, also, fraud is not mentioned. My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike ever to mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way. Anything that assimilates with one explanation, must have assimilable relations, to some degree, with all other explanations, if all explanations are somewhere continuous. Mormons are lugged in again, but the attempt is faint and helpless—"because general circumstances make it difficult to explain the presence of these tablets."
Altogether our phantom resistance is mere attribution to the Mormons, without the slightest attempt to find base for the attribution. We think of messages that were showered upon this earth, and of messages that were cached in mounds upon this earth. The similarity to the Franklin situation is striking. Conceivably centuries from now, objects dropped from relief-expedition-balloons may be found in the Arctic, and conceivably there are still undiscovered caches left by Franklin, in the hope that relief expeditions would find them. It would be as incongruous to attribute these things to the Eskimos as to attribute tablets and lettered stones to the aborigines of America. Some time I shall take up an expression that the queer-shaped mounds upon this earth were built by explorers from Somewhere, unable to get back, designed to attract attention from some other world, and that a vast sword-shaped mound has been discovered upon the moon—Just now we think of lettered things and their two possible significances.
A bizarre little lost soul, rescued from one of the morgues of the American Journal of Science:
An account, sent by a correspondent, to Prof. Silliman, of something that was found in a block of marble, taken November, 1829, from a quarry, near Philadelphia (Am. J. Sci., 1-19-361). The block was cut into slabs. By this process, it is said, was exposed an indentation in the stone, about one and a half inches by five-eighths of an inch. A geometric indentation: in it were two definite-looking raised letters, like "I U": only difference is that the corners of the "U" are not rounded, but are right angles. We are told that this block of stone came from a depth of seventy or eighty feet—or that, if acceptable, this lettering was done long, long ago. To some persons, not sated with the commonness of the incredible that has to be accepted, it may seem grotesque to think that an indentation in sand could have tons of other sand piled upon it and hardening into stone, without being pressed out—but the famous Nicaraguan footprints were found in a quarry under eleven strata of solid rock. There was no discussion of this datum. We only take it out for an airing.
As to lettered stones that may once upon a time have been showered upon Europe, if we cannot accept that the stones were inscribed by indigenous inhabitants of Europe, many have been found in caves—whence they were carried as curiosities by prehistoric men, or as ornaments, I suppose. About the size and shape of the Grave Creek stone, or disk: "flat and oval and about two inches wide." (Sollas.) Characters painted upon them: found first by M. Piette, in the cave of Mas d'Azil, Ariége. According to Sollas, they are marked in various directions with red and black lines. "But on not a few of them, more complex characters occur, which in a few instances simulate some of the capital letters of the Roman alphabet." In one instance the letters "F E I" accompanied by no other markings to modify them, are as plain as they could be. According to Sollas (Ancient Hunters, p. 95) M. Cartailhac has confirmed the observations of Piette, and M. Boule has found additional examples. "They offer one of the darkest problems of prehistoric times." (Sollas.)
As to caches in general, I should say that they are made with two purposes: to proclaim and to conceal; or that caches documents are hidden, or covered over, in conspicuous structures; at least, so are designed the cairns in the Arctic.