allet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient author of
that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are used by the
wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to have
struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols made the lightning
stones instead of digging them up out of the earth. So deeply had the
idea of the thunderbolt buried itself in the recesses of his soul, that
though a neighbouring people were still actually manufacturing stone
axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed mentally the entire
process, and supposed they dug up the thunderbolts which he saw them
using, and employed them as common hatchets. This is one of the finest
instances on record of the popular figure which grammarians call the
_hysteron proteron_, and ordinary folk describe as putting the cart
before the horse. Just so, while in some parts of Brazil the Indians are
still laboriously polishing their stone hatchets, in other parts the
planters are digging up the precisely similar stone hatchets of earlier
generations, and religiously preserving them in their houses as
undoubted thunderbolts. I have myself had pressed upon my attention as
genuine lightning stones, in the West Indies, the exquisitely polished
greenstone tomahawks of the old Carib marauders. But then, in this
matter, I am pretty much in the position of that philosophic sceptic
who, when he was asked by a lady whether he believed in ghosts, answered
wisely, 'No, madam, I have seen by far too many of them.'

One of the finest accounts ever given of the nature of thunderbolts is
that mentioned by Adrianus Tollius in his edition of 'Boethius on Gems.'
He gives illustrations of some neolithic axes and hammers, and then
proceeds to state that in the opinion of philosophers they are generated
in the sky by a fulgureous exhalation (whatever that may look like)
conglobed in a cloud by a circumfixed humour, and baked hard, as it
were, by intense heat. The weapon, it seems, then becomes pointed by the
damp mixed with it flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end
denser; while the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out
through the cloud, and makes thunder and lightning. A very lucid
explanation certainly, but rendered a little difficult of apprehension
by the effort necessary for realising in a mental picture the
conglobation of a fulgureous exhalation by a circumfixed humour.

One would like to see a drawing of the proces