ON STONE FOLK-LORE. 203 



precious as the prima materia, or the luno. alhit philosophorum — 

 white gold — was to the alchemyst. But it is just here where 

 some thinkers overstep the hues and hmits of science. The 

 question of origin is outside of its scope. True ! the greed 

 after " goold -in goupens,"* and the thirst after hfe's ehxir 

 which animated the alchemysts did much to make mineralogy 

 a true science, and to foreshadow the greatest and the grand- 

 est scientific generalization of recent time — geology itself. 

 In this paper, however, we have chiefly to do with the 

 popular notions of things, and only with a single and very 

 limited set of these : those, namely, associated with some 

 artificial and some natural shapes or forms of stone under the 

 term Stone Folklore. 



From earliest times men have looked out on nature from 

 one or other of two points of view. To some it was a reve- 

 lation, to others a mystery. To the former its phenomena 

 were facts waiting for interpretation. To the latter they 

 were suggestive of unknowable living presences, to them as. 

 real as the facts to the true student. Science was the out- 

 come of the one attitude, superstition of the other. But in 

 all cases to credit superstition to ignorance, and to separate 

 credulity from knowledge is to miss the true state of the 

 question. Like the trees of the forest, the tree of knowledge 

 often bears, what the woodsman calls, " sports," aliens, 

 essentially and historically, yet belongmgto the individuality 

 of the tree, and nourished by the very sap which gives 

 strength to the true branches. Instances are numerous as 

 the withered leaves on evergreens at midsummer. V/hat a 

 list might be given of men with this complex individuality — 

 wisdom and credulity — among the alchemysts and mystics, 

 and even among the crowd of recent believers in spiritual- 

 ism ! This association of the dreams of a sort of super- 

 naturalism with stones rare or grotesque, or with something 

 suggestive of human qualities, finds concrete expression in 

 fetishism. Traced towards its origin, perhaps it is only 

 pantheism broken into myriads of loose fragments, which 

 stand very much in the same relation to that great dream of 

 many great souls, that the numberless grains of sand of the 

 desert do to the solid freestone of the quarry. Intellectual 

 workers in many lands are diligently and carefully gathering 

 up the fragments, trying to generalize them, and to assign 



* Gold in abundance (handfuls). 



