Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/60

 46 which are known as St. Boniface's pence (S.B.'s pfennige) in Germany, were called St. Cuthbert's beads at least as far back as the date of Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677), and no doubt much earlier. Again, gryphites or "Devil's toe-nails," (called clach crubain in the tongue of old Gaul), are used in Scotland for pains in the joints, and, (perhaps in this case because they have a faint suggestiveness of the cloven hoof about them), are powdered, mixed with whey, and given as a drench to cattle. Another Liassic bivalve (hippopodium) is known as horses' or asses' feet to country people. The pterygotus anglicus, a kind of gigantic eurypterid or king-crab, leaves moulds or impressions covered with delicately-waved lines which in Scotland have been taken, according to Hugh Miller, for the markings on the wings of cherubs or "seraphim." The remains of giant saurians, such as plesiosaurus and ichthyosaurus, have long been identified in the Whitby neighbourhood as the bones of angels, and a giant saurian found near Lake Constance in 1725 was, as is well known, identified by Scheuchzer as Homo Diluvii Testis. The teeth or bones of fossil elephants, mammoths, or mastodons are identified as giants' teeth or giants' bones,—e.g. in Yorkshire and at the famous Field of Giants at Sta Fé de Bogota. Ammonites and nautili again are regarded as snakestones or "ophiomorphites," "horns of Ammon," and so forth. But over and above all this is the large class of thunderbolts and thunderstones, which include the globular concretions of iron pyrites or marcasite, (also believed to be, according to Robinson, celestial cannon balls), echini, belemnites, as well as other