NATURAL HISTORY NOTES 
97 
received the imposing designation of “ thunderstones.” Belemnites, a fossil shell 
of tapering shape, found in great numbers and variety in certain localities, have 
been similarly looked upon as “bolts from the blue.” Occasionally they are 
met with as iron pyrites or lumps of spar, very attractively crystallised, but in 
whatever form they have been petrified they are pretty certain to be regarded as 
the destructive missiles which Jupiter Pluvius has hurled from heaven to earth ! 
The damage sometimes wrought by the electric spark, the occasional occurrence 
of globular lightning and falls of meteoric stones, accompanied as the latter 
usually are with loud detonations, have each in a measure, contributed to the 
popular belief in thunderbolts. Thus a part of the inscription on the meteorite 
which fell at Ensisheim, Alsace, in 1492, and is now suspended in the church 
there, runs as follows : — 
“ Close without, before the town, 
The seventh of November’s moon, 
A stone was fallen and there it lay, 
With thunder, and in open day ! 
Two hundred and a-half it weighed ; 
Its colour iron. Then they made 
Procession, and ’twas hither borne, 
But much by force from it was torn.” 
Popular beliefs die hard, and ideas once strongly impressed upon the mind are 
stubbornly retained in spite of the obvious contradiction which Nature herself 
offers to them. And so in the generations to come, as in past ages, the flints, 
belemnites and pyrites, whenever they are unearthed, will continue to be regarded 
with wonderment as veritable “ thunderbolts.” Perhaps there is nothing for us 
to grumble at in all this, for the finders of these singular stones (which are nothing 
but complacent, old-earth relics) will always be much excited, local curiosity will 
he aroused and science will never be harmed by the innocent, if mistaken, belief 
that the objects were discharged from the clouds amid the lightning flash and the 
thunderclap ! 
Aprils, 1903. An Observer of Nature. 
There can, I think, be little doubt that the notion of thunderbolts fall- 
ing during a storm had its origin in the idea prevailing in ancient times that 
the destructive effects were due to solid missiles shot down, like a “ bolt ” 
from a bow, by celestial powers, or in later ages, from the clouds, a belief 
which would be strengthened by the fact that stones had been observed to 
fall from the skies concurrently 7 with explosions, the noise of which resembled 
thunder. Possibly such a conceit may still linger in some quarters, for a few 
years ago I came across a newspaper paragraph stating that a lightning flash 
having appeared to strike the ground at a particular spot, a party of men were 
set to work there to “dig up the thunderbolt.” In these days, when thunder 
and lightning are almost universally recognised as electrical phenomena — mani- 
festations of energy — I should, on hearing or reading that a thunderbolt had fallen 
somewhere, regard the statement as a mere figure of speech, not as denoting the 
passage downwards of any material entity 7 . There are many cases in which a 
form of expression (perhaps also a mode of thought) has continued in use after 
the belief on which it was grounded has passed away. Thus we still speak of 
the rising and setting of the sun, &c., while fully aware of the rotation of the 
earth. So also, when lightning has damaged a tree or a building, we are 
accustomed to say that it has been struck by the lightning, although there has 
been no “striking” in the sense of its having been violently hit by a solid body. 
A writer in the “ Encyclopaedia Britannica” has remarked that the term “thunder 
bolt” is nowadays rarely used except by poets and penny-a-liners. This is 
perhaps a little too sweeping. On page 456 of Professor Silvanus Thompson’s 
edition of Guillemin’s “ Electricity and Magnetism ” (in the course of an ex- 
planation of the figure of a tree and its branches found to be imprinted on the back 
of a man who had been struck by lightning while standing under a tree) reference 
is made to the part played by dust or other matter “in the case of the fall of a 
thunderbolt.” I do not take this to imply that in such a case any actual thing 
falls to the ground, scattering the dust as a heavy stone or weight would. The 
author (or the translator) has simply made use of a convenient and time-honoured 
