ON STONE FOLK-LORE. 



207 



head to protect tlie babe from the more than khid good folk 

 — the fah'ies — appears to be now forgotten. 



5. Thunderbolt and Elf-!Shot Stones introduce ns to 

 another folk-lore element than that chiefly before us in the 

 instances given above. In them ignorance of their natural 

 characteristics found a footing for superstition, but the 

 so-called thunderbolts and elf-shots bear marks of design 

 which ignorance ascribes to supernatural art. The celts, or 

 stone-axes of the Stone Age, and in districts where Jurassic 

 strata occur, belemuites — the fossilized homologous part of 

 the present sepia and cuttlefish — were regarded as thunder- 

 bolts. The flint arrow heads of the same age were believed 

 to be weapons used by evil-disposed fairies against domestic 

 animals — causing cattle disease, and more fi-equently taking 

 the milk away from cows. The cm-e was homoeopathic — 

 similia similibus curantur. The wise woman of the district 

 ordered the murrain stricken animals to be touched by the 

 elf-shot, and the cow with the shrunk and milkless udder to 

 be made to drink clear water out of a vessel at the bottom 

 of which it could see the thrown-in elf-shot. If the cures 

 failed, the failure was traced to want of faith in the agent. 

 The superstition is not dead. A place might be named in an 

 out-of-the-way mountainous district where a celt is kept 

 carefully wi-apped up in cloth that had never been used for 

 any other purpose, and is wont to be employed whenever 

 disease appears among the cattle. Belief in its virtue has 

 been gradually declining, and it is now trusted only by those 

 bordering on the threescore years and ten, one of whom 

 recently pointed to its neglect as a proof of the depravity of 

 the age ! 



6. Fairy-Stones are fantastically shaped forms met with 

 in alluvial clays. Th^y are the claystone concretions of 

 geology, and the fairy-art products of folk-lore. They are 

 interesting from the point of view both of science and 

 superstition. When subjected to scientific examination they 

 suggest several questions of some importance in physical 

 geology and chemical mineralogy, especially such as deal 

 with mineral secretion, concretionary action, chemical aggre- 

 gation, and the like. We are in the habit of limiting the 

 term conglomerate to consolidated mineral masses consisting 

 of pebbles of various kinds, generally rounded, and differing 

 from the paste or matrix in which they are met with.. The 

 term concretion, again, usually indicates the outcome of a 

 tendency among many mechanically mixed, but apparently 



