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, w