Free Wild Talents by Charles Fort Page B

chair—though sometimes I can scrawl a little with the burnt end of a match—I shall probably make a note to strike out those rabid bats, with froth on their bloody mouths. I shall be prim and austere, all played out, after my labors of the day, and with my horse powers stabled for the night. My better self is ascendant when my energy is low. The best literary standards are affronted by those sensational bats.
    I now have a theory that our existence, as a whole, is an organism that is very old—a globular thing within a starry shell, afloat in a super-existence in which there may be countless other organisms—and that we, as cells in its composition, partake of, and are ruled by, its permeating senility. The theologians have recognized that the ideal is the imitation of God. If we be a part of such an organic thing, this thing is God to us, as I am God to the cells that compose me. When I see myself, and cats, and dogs losing irregularities of conduct, and approaching the irreproachable, with advancing age, I see that what is ennobling us is senility. I conclude that the virtues, the austerities, the proprieties are ideal in our existence, because they are imitations of the state of a whole existence, which is very old, good, and beyond reproach. The ideal state is meekness, or humility, or the semi-invalid state of the old. Year after year I am becoming nobler and nobler. If I can live to be decrepit enough, I shall be a saint.
    It may be that there are vampires other than vampire bats. I have wondered at the specialization of appetite in the traditional stories of vampires. If blood be desired, why not the blood of cattle and sheep? According to many stories there have been unexplained attacks upon human beings; also there have been countless outrages upon other animals.
    Possibly the remote ancestors of human beings were apes, though no evolutionist has made clear to me reasons for doubting the equally plausible theory that apes have either ascended, or descended, from humans. Still, I think that humans may have evolved from apes, because the simians openly imitate humans, as if conscious of a higher state, whereas the humans who act like apes are likely to deny it when criticized. Slashers and rippers of cattle may be throw-backs to the ape-era. But, though it is said that, in the Kenya Colony, Africa, baboons sometimes mutilate cattle, I’d not say that the case against them has been made out. London Daily Mail, May 18, 1925—that, for some years, an alarming epidemic of sheep-slashing and cattle-ripping had been breaking out, in the month of April, on Kenya stock ranches. Natives were blamed, but then it was learned that their cattle, too, had been attacked. Then it was said to be proved that chacma baboons were the marauders. Possibly the baboons, too, were unjustly blamed. Then what? The wounds were long, deep cuts, as if vicious slashes with a knife; but it was explained that baboons kill by ripping with their thumbnails.
    The most widely known case of cattle-mutilation is that in which was involved a young lawyer, George Edalji, son of a Hindu, who was a clergyman in the village of Wyrley, Staffordshire, England. The first of a series of outrages occurred upon the night of Feb. 2, 1903. A valuable horse was ripped. Then, at intervals, up to August 27th, there were mutilations of horses, cows, and sheep.
    Suspicion was directed to Edalji, because of anonymous letters, accusing him.
    After the mutilation of a horse, August 27th, Edalji was arrested. The police searched his house, and, according to them, found an old coat, upon which were bloodstains. In the presence of Edalji’s parents and his sister, the police said that there were horse hairs upon this coat. The coat was taken to the police station, where Dr. Butler, the police surgeon, examined it, reporting that upon it he had found twenty-nine horse hairs. The police said that shoes worn by Edalji exactly fitted tracks in the field, where the horse had