THUNDERBOLTS 145 



the entire process, and supposed they dug up the thunder- 

 bolts which he saw them using, and employed them as 

 common hatchets. This is one of the finest instances on 

 record of the popular figure which grammarians call the 

 hystcron 'protcron, and ordinary folk describe as putting the 

 cart before the horse. Just so, while in some parts of 

 Brazil the Indians are still laboriously polishing their 

 stone hatchets, in other parts the planters are digging up 

 the precisely similar stone hatchets of earlier generations, 

 and religiously preserving them in their houses as 

 undoubted thunderbolts. I have myself had pressed upon 

 my attention as genuine lightning stones, in the AVest 

 Indies, the exquisitely polished greenstone tomahawks of 

 the old Carib marauders. But then, in this matter, I am 

 pretty much in the position of that philosophic sceptic 

 who, when he was asked by a lady whether he believed in 

 ghosts, answered wisely, * No, madam, I have seen by far 

 too many of them.' 



One of the finest accounts ever given of the nature of 

 thunderbolts is that mentioned by Adrianus Tollius in his 

 edition of ' Boethius on Gems.' He gives illustrations of 

 some neolithic axes and hammers, and then proceeds to 

 state that in the opinion of philosophers they are generated 

 in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation (whatever that may 

 look like) conglobed in a cloud by a circumfixed humour, 

 and baked hard, as it were, by intense heat. The weapon, 

 it seems, then becomes pointed by the damp mixed with 

 it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end 

 denser ; while the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks 

 out through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. 

 A very lucid explanation certainly, but rendered a little 

 difficult of apprehension by the eflbrt necessary for realising 

 in a mental picture the conglobation of a fulgureous ex- 

 halation by a circumfixed humour. 



