GEMS FROM PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, 
111 
which St. Hilda, the relative of Northiimbria's powerful monarch, 
Edwin, was the abbess. It was there the famous council was held to 
decide the keeping of Easter (-v.b., 66 1) ; it was on those rugged 
shores of the North Sea that the early stand was made by Colman on 
behalf of the native religion against the then increasing dominion of 
the llomish Church. It was there reposed the remains of Edwin, 
Oswy, Aelflcda, 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 Cffidmon, 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 
Theii' 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 Ammonis. 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 
