GEMS FROM PRIVATE COLLECTIONS. 



Ill 



which St. Hilda, the relative of Northumbria's powerful monarch, 

 Edwin, was the abbess. It was there the famous council was held to 

 decide the keeping of Easter (a.d., 664) ; it was on those rugged 

 shores of the Xorth Sea that the early stand was made by Colman on 

 behalf of the native religion against the then increasing dominion of 

 the Romish Church. It was there reposed the remains of Edwin, 

 Oswy, Aelfleda, and of the Saxon Hilda herself. Associated with its 

 monastic rule were many of the famous men of the olden times — Bosa, 

 Aetla, Oftfor, Wilfred, and Ccedmon, to whom Bede says sublime 

 strains of poetry were so natural that he dreamed in verse, and com- 

 posed in sleep that which he penned on awaking. And the history of 

 Whitby is pleasingly associated with its geology by the legend of its 

 saint. 



Of all the numerous fossils which occur so abundantly in the Lias 

 none are more common, and few more beautiful, than the abundant 

 form we have figured, the Ammonites communis, so long and 

 so well-known as the Snake Stones," into which St. Hilda, by her 

 devotional fervour, is reputed to have changed those obnoxious reptiles 

 in this district. 



Sir "Walter Scott alludes to this as well as the other legend respect- 

 ing this saint in his noble poem of *'Marmion." 



At the banquet which is spread after the voyage of the abbess in the 

 old monastery of Streones-healh, the nuns relate : — 



" How of thousand snakes each one 

 Was changed into a coil of stone 

 When holy Hilda prayed. 

 Themselves within their holy bound 

 Their stony folds had often found." 



The snakes, however, appearing to have lost their heads, and to 

 have been decapitated before or in the process of petrification, these 

 fossils became a source of great tribulation to those who thus attempted 

 to account for their origin. The ''curiosity" dealers knew better how 

 to treat the subject, and carved heads out of the matrix, demanding 

 high prices for these so-styled ''perfect" specimens. 



The generic name Ammonites has its origin in the fancied resem- 

 blance of these shells to the ram's horn with which the antique heads of 

 Jupiter Ammon are sculptured : hence by early writers they were called 

 Cornua Ammouis. Amun or Ammun, of the Egyptians; Zeus Ammon 

 or Hammon, of the Greeks ; Jupiter Ammon, of the Romans ; were the 

 designations of an Egyptian god, or more properly of a deity of 

 Ethiopian extraction, worshipped over a considerable portion of Egypt, 

 and frequently found figured with a ram's head and a human 

 body in the monuments and works of art of that country. 

 Herodotus gives us the following story in relation to these curious 

 attributes of the god : — Heracles, or with us more popularly Hercules, 

 being with his army in the deserts of Africa, so importuned 

 the god Zeus, who did not wish to show himself, that Zeus at last hit 

 on this expedient — flaying a ram, and cutting off its head, he put it 

 before his face, and then getting into the skin, showed himself to 



