investigators, but almost all are equally good representatives of the mythical thunderbolt.  The finest specimens are long, thick, cylindrical, and gradually tapering, with a hole at one end as if on purpose to receive the shaft.  Sometimes they have petrified into iron pyrites or copper compounds, shining like gold, and then they make very noble thunderbolts indeed, heavy as lead, and capable of doing profound mischief if properly directed.  At other times they have crystallised in transparent spar, and then they form very beautiful objects, as smooth and polished as the best lapidary could possibly make them.  Belemnites are generally found in immense numbers together, especially in the marlstone quarries of the Midlands, and in the lias cliffs of Dorsetshire.  Yet the quarrymen who find them never seem to have their faith shaken in the least by the enormous quantities of thunderbolts that would appear to have struck a single spot with such extraordinary frequency This little fact also tells rather hardly against the theory that the lightning never falls twice upon the same place.

Only the largest and heaviest belemnites are known as thunder stones; the smaller ones are more commonly described as agate pencils.  In Shakespeare’s country their connection with thunder is well known, so that in all probability a belemnite is the original of the beautiful lines in ’Cymbeline’:—­

    Fear no more the lightning flash,
    Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone,

where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt is particularly well indicated.  In every part of Europe belemnites and stone hatchets are alike regarded as thunderbolts; so that we have the curious result that people confuse under a single name a natural fossil of immense antiquity and a human product of comparatively recent but still prehistoric date.  Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian tomahawk.  Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.

Many other natural or artificial objects have added their tittle to the belief in thunderbolts.  In the Himalayas, for example, where awful thunderstorms are always occurring as common objects of the country, the torrents which follow them tear out of the loose soil fossil bones and tusks and teeth, which are universally looked upon as lightning-stones.  The nodules of pyrites, often picked up on beaches, with their false appearance of having been melted by intense heat, pass muster easily with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts.  But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones.  Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and catalogued.  Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth.  To be sure, meteors have no kind of natural connection with thunderstorms; they may fall anywhere and at any time; but to object thus is to be hypercritical.  A stone that falls from heaven, no matter how or when, is quite good enough to be considered as a thunderbolt.