m;
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 investigators, but almost all are equally
good representatives of the mythical thunderbolt. The finest