Meteors, indeed, might very easily be confounded with lightning, especially by people who already have the full-blown conception of a thunderbolt floating about vaguely in their brains.  The meteor leaps upon the earth suddenly with a rushing noise; it is usually red-hot when it falls, by friction against the air; it is mostly composed of native iron and other heavy metallic bodies; and it does its best to bury itself in the ground in the most orthodox and respectable manner.  The man who sees this parlous monster come whizzing through the clouds from planetary space, making a fiery track like a great dragon as it moves rapidly across the sky, and finally ploughing its way into the earth in his own back garden, may well be excused for regarding it as a fine specimen of the true antique thunderbolt.  The same virtues which belong to the buried stone are in some other places claimed for meteoric iron, small pieces of which are worn as charms, specially useful in protecting the wearer against thunder, lightning, and evil incantations.  In many cases miraculous images have been hewn out of the stones that have fallen from heaven; and in others the meteorite itself is carefully preserved or worshipped as the actual representative of god or goddess, saint or madonna.  The image that fell down from Jupiter may itself have been a mass of meteoric iron.

Both meteorites and stone hatchets, as well as all other forms of thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets, not only against lightning, but against the evil eye generally.  In Italy they protect the owner from thunder, epidemics, and cattle disease, the last two of which are well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in the ‘Tempest’ is a surviving proof how thunderstorms, too, can be magically produced.  The tongues of sheep-bells ought to be made of meteoric iron or of elf-bolts, in order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth disease or death by storm.  Built into walls or placed on the threshold of stables, thunderbolts are capital preventives of fire or other damage, though not perhaps in this respect quite equal to a rusty horseshoe from a prehistoric battlefield.  Thrown into a well they purify the water; and boiled in the drink of diseased sheep they render a cure positively certain.  In Cornwall thunderbolts are a sovereign remedy for rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacopoeia of Ireland they have been employed with success for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many other painful diseases.  If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal, they render the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest of his lifetime.  But they cannot conscientiously be recommended for dyspepsia and other forms of indigestion.