ith 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.

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, an