On this primitive principle, possession of a thunderbolt gives you some sort of hold, as it were, over the thunder-god himself in person.  If you keep a thunderbolt in your house it will never be struck by lightning.  In Shetland, stone axes are religiously preserved in every cottage as a cheap and simple substitute for lightning-rods.  In Cornwall, the stone hatchets and arrowheads not only guard the house from thunder, but also act as magical barometers, changing colour with the changes of the weather, as if in sympathy with the temper of the thunder-god.  In Germany, the house where a thunderbolt is kept is safe from the storm; and the bolt itself begins to sweat on the approach of lightning-clouds.  Nay, so potent is the protection afforded by a thunderbolt that where the lightning has once struck it never strikes again; the bolt already buried in the soil seems to preserve the surrounding place from the anger of the deity.  Old and pagan in their nature as are these beliefs, they yet survive so thoroughly into Christian times that I have seen a stone hatchet built into the steeple of a church to protect it from lightning.  Indeed, steeples have always of course attracted the electric discharge to a singular degree by their height and tapering form, especially before the introduction of lighting-rods; and it was a sore trial of faith to mediaeval reasoners to understand why heaven should hurl its angry darts so often against the towers of its very own churches.  In the Abruzzi the flint axe has actually been Christianised into St. Paul’s arrows—­saetti de San Paolo.  Families hand down the miraculous stones from father to son as a precious legacy; and mothers hang them on their children’s necks side by side with medals of saints and madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized as the stones that fall from heaven.

Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the belemnite, a common English fossil often preserved in houses in the west country with the same superstitious reverence as the neolithic hatchets.  The very form of the belemnite at once suggests the notion of a dart or lance-head, which has gained for it its scientific name.  At the present day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for the classical tripos, I need hardly translate the word belemnite ’for the benefit of the ladies,’ as people used to do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth century; but as our boys have left off learning Greek just as their sisters are beginning to act the ‘Antigone’ at private theatricals, I may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, ’for the benefit of the gentlemen,’ that the word is practically equivalent to javelin-fossil.  The belemnites are the internal shells of a sort of cuttle-fish which swam about in enormous numbers in the seas whose sediment forms our modern lias, oolite, and gault.  A great many different species are known and have acquired charming names in very doubtful Attic at the hands of profoundly learned geological