To many minds there’s rest and there’s satisfaction in that expression “absolutely identified.” Absoluteness, or the illusion of it–the universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds, that’s assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated, little world, free from contact with cosmic wickednesses, safe from stellar guile, undisturbed by inter-planetary prowlings and invasions.
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 32 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).