ites, was properly a talisman. All the
miraculous things wrought by Apollonius Tyanaeus are attributed to the
virtue and influence of _talismans_; and that wizard, as he is called,
is even said to be the inventor of them. Some authors take several
Runic medals,--medals, at least, whose inscriptions are in the Runic
characters,--for talismans, it being notorious that the northern
nations, in their heathen state, were much devoted to them, M. Keder,
however has shown, that the medals here spoken of are quite other things
than talismans.

It appears from the Evangelists[115] that, when St. Paul, after he had
been shipwrecked, and escaped to the island of Malta, a viper fastened
on his hand as he was laying a bundle of sticks, he had gathered, on the
fire; and that, by a miracle, and to the great astonishment of the
spectators, inhabitants of the island, he not only suffered no harm, but
also cured, by the divine power, the chief of the island, and a great
number of others, of very dangerous maladies. There remain still in that
island, as so many trophies gained by the Apostle over that venemous
beast, a great many small stones representing the eyes and tongues of
serpents, and considered for several centuries past, as powerful amulets
against different sorts of distempers and poisons. As the virtue of
these stones is still much boasted of by the Maltese, and as some, on
the contrary, maintain that they are the petrified teeth of a fish
called lamia, it will not be irrelevant here to relate some observations
from the best authors on this interesting subject, so much to our
purpose.

It is said that those eyes and tongues of serpents are only found by the
Maltese when they dig into the earth, which is whitish throughout the
island, or draw up stone, especially about the cave of St. Paul. This
stone is so soft, that, like clay, it may be cut through with any sharp
instrument, and made to receive easily different figures, for building
the walls of their houses and ramparts; but, when it has been imbibed
with a sufficient quantity of rain or well water, it changes into a
flint that resists the cutting of the sharpest instrument: whence the
houses that are built of it in the two cities, appear as hewn out of one
solid rock, and become harder, the more they are exposed to the
inclemencies of the weather. This hardness may, with good reason, be
ascribed to the salt of nitre, which contracts a certain viscidity from
the rain wher