Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/85

Rh bearing on thunder-bolts, Tylor proceeds to describe the Peruvian belief about a deity called Catequil the Thunder-god, child of the Heaven-god, who in thunder-clap and flash hurls from his sling the small, round, smooth thunder-stones, treasured in the villages as fire-fetishes and charms, to kindle the flame of love. It will be observed here that Catequil's thunderbolts are also but stones, and certainly not stone implements.

Information as to the keraunic axehead seems, for whatever reason, very slight for China. We must hope that fuller information will turn up. Sir J. Evans states that in China celts are called lightning stones, (which suggests the keraunic belief), but Professor Giles, in a letter of May 25th, 1911, wrote to me:—

For the existence of the belief in Japan, we have the authority of Montelius and Evans.

A similarly disappointing result is obtained from Egypt, with regard to which Professor Flinders Petrie wrote to me on May 21st:—

“There is an abundance of stone implements in Egypt, of all periods. But I do not know that any beliefs about them existed either with reference to powdering them or as to a thunderbolt origin. The only suggestion to the contrary, which has come from Professor Newberry, of Liverpool, is, I understand, to the effect that belemnites occurring in the Eocene limestone at Ekhmein in Upper Egypt may have been regarded as a thunder-bolt, and may have suggested the standard of the god Min. The