Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/75

 Rh First, as to the belemnite, the Scottish geologist Hugh Miller, in The Old Red Sandstone, remarks that he

Again, the earliest Scottish mention I have been able to find is in 1703, when Martin, in A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland speaking of Strath and Trotterness in Skye, remarks:—

There is of course no mention here of thunderbolts.

At Whitby, according to Robinson, the term thunderbolt applied to "the petrified remains of a kind of cuttle-fish, in the Whitby Lias, resembling tubes of various lengths and thicknesses tapering to a point." The comparison here made between the "thunderbolt" of this kind and a tube is not quite accurate, since a tube is generally considered to be hollow, whereas these fossils are, with the exception of a small and shallow cavity at the upper end, perfectly solid, and may be more suitably compared to a cigar than to a tube. I may add that the Greek Belemnon, whence they get their name, means dart or javelin, and is connected with the verb "ballein," to cast.