OTHER MAGICAL STONES 93 



The belief in the existence of a stone of magical proper- 

 ties in the head of the toad is only one of many instances 

 of beliefs of a closely similar kind which were accepted by 

 Pliny (although he records no such belief as to the toad- 

 stone), and were passed on from his treatise on natural 

 history in a more or less muddled form to the middle ages, 

 and so to our own time by later writers. Thus Pliny cites, 

 as stones possessing magical properties, the " Bronte " 

 found in the head of the tortoise, the Cinaedia in the head 

 of a fish of that name, the Chelonites, a grass-green stone 

 found in a swallow's belly, the Draconites, which must be 

 cut out of the head of a live serpent, the Hyaenia from the 

 eye of the Hyaena, and the Saurites from the bowels of a 

 green lizard. All these and the Echites, or viper-stone, 

 were credited with extraordinary magical virtues, and many 

 of the assertions of later writers about the toad-stone are 

 clearly due to their having calmly transferred the mar- 

 vellous stories about other imaginary stones to the imagi- 

 nary toad-stone. The only stone in the above list which 

 has a real existence is that in the fish's head. Fish have 

 a pair of beautiful translucent stones in their heads — the 

 ear-stones or otoliths — by the laminated structure of which 

 we now can determine the age of a fish just as a tree's age 

 is told by the annual rings of growth in the wood of its 

 stem. The fresh-water crayfish has a very curious pair of 

 opaque stones (concretions of carbonate and phosphate of 

 lime) formed in its gizzard as a normal and regular thing. 

 They are familiar to every student who dissects a crayfish, 

 and I am told that in Germany to-day, as in old times 

 also, the " krebstein " is regarded by the country-folk as 

 possessed of medicinal and magical properties. ' I am not 

 able, on the present occasion, to trace out the possible 

 origin of all the stories and beliefs about stones occurring 

 within animals. They are more numerous than those cited 

 by Pliny ; they exist in every race and every civilisation 



