made between two sorts of these cerauniæ or thunder-stones, black and red; that they resemble axes; that those which are darker and rounder (that is, more rubbed and rounded at the angles) are sacred; that by their help cities and fleets are conquered, and that their specific name is bætulus. The longer sort are simply called cerauniæ; but some will have it that a very rare variety exists, eagerly sought by students of the magic art and never found, save where a thunderbolt has struck the spot. Does the reader remember the old myth of Rhea and of the pitiless Chronos, the Saturn of the Latin tongue, who ate his offspring? When Zeus, the Latin Jove, was born, Rhea, forecasting her newborn infant's future sovereignty, tendered to the voracious father a stone instead. Now, this stone was swaddled in a rough goatskin garment known as bacte (Bairn) to the herdsmen of the hills. Hence came the name of bætulus (Baróλos and Barúλior), and hence the magic power of these wonderful stones. For the great Zeus was not unmindful of the risks his early days had run. No thunderbolt could scathe, no salt sea wave engulph, the happy owner of so potent an amulet. Nay, more, the warrior armed therewith failed not to storm the city of his foe or to sink his fleet.

But the learned Bochart thinks otherwise. He had read, indeed, in the translation of Philo Byblius how Sanchoniathon had written of old that "the god "Ouranos had conceived the bætulia,

living stones (Xilovs éμúxovs)." But he (Bochart) had elsewhere convicted Philo of being an ignoramus in his Semitic languages, and so here was a misreading or a mistranslation. It should have been "anointed" stones, not "living stones ;" and here was the true derivation of "bætulion." It was the stone which Jacob had used for a pillow, had anointed, had set up, had called "Beth-el." This was the prototype of consecrated stones; and there was in support that old saying of the rabbis:

"Though Jacob's stone were beloved "of God in the days of the patriarchs, "nevertheless He afterwards hated it,

seeing that they of Canaan wrested it "unto idolatrous rites."

But either Bochart was himself mistaken, or at all events he came centuries too late to root out the conviction that the bætuli had life in them. There are indeed so many seemingly bonâ fide declarations of their motion through the air, or of their crashing fall from the sky, that one would naturally be led to suppose these ceraunians to be aërolites, meteoric stones, were it not for two tolerably conclusive reasons. The first is, that no trace of metallic substance or quality can be discerned in any description of their form or colour; the second, that their frequency in drifts and diluvial caverns is more than once expressly dwelt upon. As in the remarkable passage of Claudian1:

"Pyrenæisque sub antris Ignea flumineæ legêre ceraunia Nymphæ." "Neath Pyrenæan caves Nymphs of the flood have gathered fiery thunderstones."

Whilst on the topic of their supernatural properties, I am tempted to abridge here a story upon which I stumbled in a Byzantine digest of the works of one Damascius, a pagan writer of the Justinian era. He had himself seen, as he states, a bætulus move through the air; and in his life of the Platonic philosopher Isidorus, relates the following tale.

There was in the city of Emesa (Homs in Syria) a certain Eusebius, professor of the healing art. One sleepless midnight an irresistible impulse drove him out to climb a hill-top at some distance from the town, where stood, in somewhat dilapidated magnificence, a once renowned temple of Athene. As he sat in rest and meditation, a globe of fire came crashing down; and the huge form of a lion stood, as on guard, beside it. When

1 Claudian, "Laud Seren." v. 77. I am indebted for this and other references to a

of certain specimens of tongue-stones, among which occurs an unmistakeable thunderstone. Its shape, its serrated edges, more than usually regular, and, probably, the polish of its workmanship, account readily enough for our finding it in company with the true glossopetræ in the collections of naturalists who held it for certain that these latter were mineral substances.

Pliny, indeed, had boldly affirmed of these tongue-stones, too, that "they were no products of the earth, but wont to fall from the sky when the moon was on the wane." But the Italian and German naturalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though sometimes timid in face of Pliny's time-honoured authority, were not always prepared to forgo the results of their own observations any more than to accept the shrewd conjectures of men who were nearer to the truth than themselves. 66 Some," writes Mercati, "call these glossopetræ lightning-bolts, and confound them with the cerauniæ, wrongly. Some would have them to be the teeth of those armed fishes and tortoises (testaceorum), which remained in the earth after the universal deluge; which opinion should beyond doubt be exploded, seeing that they be stones of a special sort, and having their own special mines."

The reader guesses, doubtless, what the true fact is. These glossopetræ are simply fossil teeth of fishes, saurians, and the like. "One great mine for them," says again Mercati, "is in Malta, in a tufaceous, sponge-like rock. They abound likewise in Sardinia and the Balearic Isles." A native of the Greek Archipelago had brought him one from thence. A friend had sent him a specimen from near Sienna, and his own father had possessed several, found by chance in the soil of his native San Miniato. Around these tongue-stones clustered in Mercati's time, and in the days immediately before him, more superstitious frauds and follies than even round the mysterious thunder-stones. The thin, long, pointed sort, which he

special request. The ancients, as Pliny had told, had ascribed to them ridiculous, and, as it would seem, somewhat disreputable qualities (lenocinanti necessarium). There was a Greek tradition that vows made at the altars had propitious issue to him who made them, whilst bearing about this talisman. In those more modern days of his, they were a potent charm against death by lightning or by drowning. Silly women hung them round the necks of sucking children, set in gold and silver, to make teething easy, and to deliver the baby from frights and frettings generally. They were a fine thing for bringing pleasant dreams; and other tomfooleries were asserted of them. But one thing specially moved his bile as a physician. "Those dregs of the vulgar-that race of men, worthless in itself, and harmful to the many; your tramping, market-placehaunting quacks, had their theory as to the origin of these smaller tonguestones. They exhibit them shamelessly as serpents' horns, and sell them on the lying pretence that they give warning, by visible sweating, at the presence of poison. Others than mere private men, with shame be it owned, are fooled into belief of these idle tales, and out of round sums of money, which they pay for the purchase, thinking to have secured a great safeguard against poison, whereas they have gotten for their gold nothing besides the shuffling words of those that have duped them."

Perhaps, as private physician to three successive Popes, it stirred his indignation from the deep to know that a former occupant of the Pontifical chair had lent ear to this worthless delusion. But so it had been; and he puts in two very curious documents in proof. They are letters from John XXII., the second Pope who ruled from Avignon, having been elected to succeed Clement V. in 1316. He was a man who lived in dread of poison, and who, indeed, handed over to the secular arm the Bishop of Cahors, his native city, on a charge of endeavouring to compass his death.

Now, there was a certain noble lady, one Margaret, Countess of Foix, who had, according to the Pope's own expression in the first of his letters to her, a maternal solicitude for his safety and length of life. She was the fortunate possessor of one of these priceless serpents' horns, which she determined, not to give-that was more than even a motherly solicitude could exact-but to lend to his Holiness, as a faithful monitor and safeguard. Accordingly-for the treasure was a treasure indeed, and might not be trusted to a chance messenger, nor even to a solitary trusteeshe lighted upon two dignitaries of the Church in her parts, Raymond, of Bearn, Archdeacon of Lescar, and Manaldus, Canon of Oleron, who conveyed the talisman to the Pope's own hands. The first of the letters given by Mercati is in a more familiar style than the second, of which it promises the despatch to serve as a "receipt, and as an obligatory pledge of restitution." This more precise and formal acknowledgment is so curious a document, and so characteristic of the reckless use of that tremendous spiritual power claimed by the occupants of the Papal chair, that I am tempted to give it at length.

"To our beloved daughter in Christ, the noble

lady, Margaret, Countess of Foix. "Behold, daughter, that serpent's horn, shapen as the haft of a small knife, which is said to be of avail against the frauds of poison, which lately was made over to us by our beloved sons thy messengers, Raymond Archdeacon, &c., and Manaldus Canon of Oleron, We do acknowledge to have received by way of loan and We do promise to restore it, without obstacle of delay or difficulty, to thyself or to thine accredited deputy, when We shall be certified of thy demand upon Us to such effect. We do pledge to thee on this behalf ourselves and all our goods, movable or immovable, whatsoever and wheresoever they may be.

Further, Against any man soever who shall detain this horn against thy will, after having been summoned to restore it by thyself or thine accredited proxy, from this day as from that,─We do promulgate sentence of Excommunication."

Well may Mercati remark that the Pontiff on this occasion makes use of strong language (verbis splendidis)! But

more ancient than the earliest classical quotation which may notice them. I had the opportunity of verifying this upon a close inspection of Castellani's wonderful collection of Etruscan jewellery. I detected them, in their natural condition, only mounted in holders of exquisite gold filigree, dangling as pendants from brooches and necklaces of the remotest Etruscan age. I learnt also, rather to my surprise, that their real nature was not known; but that a curious myth, whether ancient or modern I cannot say, gave this account of them - that they were cock's spurs, natural or artificial, used as charms against the dreaded assaults of the Gauls, when the tribes of the Galli, the nation of the Cocks, began first to scratch and peck upon the rich middens of the Etrurian soil.

I must claim attention to the words "natural or artificial." Those early Etruscan jewellers, doubtless finding in their ungeological age that the true fossil tongue-stones were scarce, determined that their fair and superstitious customers should at least enjoy the shape, if not the real substance, of the magic amulet. They therefore betook themselves to copy the forms in agate, bloodstone, and the like: and there you may see them still in Castellani's glass cases, the manifest prototypes of those little pointed charms of coral, ivory, or horn which Naples provides against the jettatura, the spell of an "evil eye."

I now return, for a brief space only, to my original Cerauniæ, flints wrought by human hands, some shapes of which the shrewd Italian medico conjectures to have been, what they really were, rude weapons of offence. He backs this opinion by a fragment from Ennius :

"Incedit veles volgo sicilicibus latis." "The light-armed footman marches most times with broad flints."

The Germans, if we may take the learned Gesner1 for their representative, never appear to have wavered in their conviction that the Cerauniæ were thun

1 See his "Account of Kentmann's Fossils."

derbolts; which seems a marvel when we consider how accurately they distinguished the shapes of these wrought flints, giving names which exactly describe their human purposes and uses. For they are not content with the more general term "thunderstone;" there is the "thunder-wedge," the "thunderhammer," the "thunder-axe," the "thunder-arrow;" yet the bore made in the thunder-hammer to receive the handle is conjecturally set down to the force of the red-hot lightning which hurled them from the sky!

But neither ancients nor mediævalists were content merely to speculate upon the nature and origin of these mysterious stones; nor was it enough to use them as gem-like ornaments, nor even to juggle with their magical qualities. It would appear upon the testimony of one Heras, a Cappadocian physician, in the time of Domitian, that ladies' shoemakers used certain of them for polishing their more exquisite "chaussures," and gave them, for obvious reasons, the name of "never-olds," dynparot. These, of course, were the rubbed axe-heads, or hammers. Such were also those which were used as burnishers by gold and silversmiths towards the close of the Middle Ages. The Blackmore Museum1 at Salisbury has a stone axe-head on which, spite of its fine quality as a "never-old," the traces of such use are

1 It may interest students of flint art to know that the few and only specimens from the Roman drift now in England were gathered in Rome, last winter, by the writer and have been deposited by him in the Museum aforesaid, of which the formal opening will take place at Salisbury on the 4th and 5th of this present September. The choice character and

manifest. But Galen, the famous physician of the second century, ground them into powder to be used as a dry application, or as a gargle, in cases of slight inflammation of the uvula.

Moreover, if we are to take Aldrovandus for our instructor, there be moral uses in the thunderstone and practical allegories. In respect, for instance, of its crashing stroke, does it not manifestly typify worldly calamity? For as the thunderbolt strikes and spoils all things save the laurel bush here below so doth worldly calamity cut down and crush all else but virtue. But, in respect of its power to ward off from its bearer the lightning's deadly dart, does it not plainly stand for patience, the surest charm a man may bear about him against the strokes of fortune? But, in respect again of this strange contradiction-that having its birth and origin amidst the lightning and the thunder, it should have such sovereign. power and influence against their flame, and heat and violence-does it not set forth the truth that men whose character is formed amidst the fiery crash of crimes and sins, if by repentance they be recovered and changed, are of all others the most thoroughly proof against the fiery darts of the enemy? As every man must own who shall bethink him of the great Apostle Paul.

R. S. C. C.

world-wide range of this collection, illustrative of the primitive industry of man, may well persuade a visit on the occasion to the old cathedral city, near neighbour to Stonehenge, and nearer neighbour still to a drift which has furnished most significant specimens of fossils and wrought flints.

THERE is nothing that tends so much to depreciate the labours of the ordinary statistical inquirer as the obscurity which, for the most part, he fails to re

social phenomena which he chronicles. By widening the area of his calculations and reiterating the various processes by which he verifies them, he can place his