THUNDERBOLTS 149 



ning-rods ; and it was a sore trial of faith to mcdifcval 

 reasoners to understand why heaven should hurl its angry 

 darts so often against the towers of its very own churches. 

 In the Abruzzi the flint axe has actually been Christianised 

 into St. Paul's arrows — saetti de San Paolo. Families 

 hand down the miraculous stones from father to son as a 

 precious legacy ; and mothers hang them on their chil- 

 dren's necks side by side with medals of saints and 

 madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized 

 as the stones that fall from heaven. 



Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the 

 belemnite, a common English fossil often preserved in 

 houses in the west country with the same superstitious 

 reverence as the neolithic hatchets. The very form of the 

 belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or lance- 

 head, which has gained for it its scientific name. At the 

 present day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for 

 the classical tripos, I need hardly translate the word 

 belemnitti * for the benefit of the ladies,' as people used to 

 do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth century ; 

 but as our boys liave left off learning Greek just as their 

 sisters are beginning to act the ' Antigone ' at private 

 theatricals, I may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, ' for 

 the benefit of the gentlenen,' that the word is practically 

 equivalent to javelin-fossil. The belemnites are the in- 

 ternal shells of a sort of cuttle-fish which swam about in 

 enormous numbers in the seas whose sediment forms our 

 modern lias, oolite, and gault. A great many different 

 species are known and have acquired charming names in 

 very doubtful Attic at the hands of profoundly learned 

 geological investigators, but almost all are equally good 

 representatives of the mythical thunderbolt. The finest 

 specimens are long, thick, cylindrical, and gradually taper- 

 ing, with a hole at one end as if on purpose to receive the 



