Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/426

 1 1 8 Snake Stones.

were ever distinct the two lines of tradition coalesced before the mists of antiquity gathered. Mary A. Berkeley.

Cranborne, Nr. Salisbury.

Snake Stones. [Folk-Lore, vol. xxxii. p. 262 et seqq.)

To my friend and colleague Mr. J. Glyn Davies I owe the follow- ing references in correction of a blunder in my note upon "Snake Stones," Folk-Lore, xxxii., p. 267, where, trusting foolishly to a secondary authority, I perpetuated a misprint, of which my ignorance of Welsh prevented the detection. The correct name of the Welsh snake stone is not Maen Magi but Maen Magi, i.e. spotted stone. The word magi is of some interest because it is clearly a loan word from monastic Latin. In modern Welsh, as Mr. Glyn Davies tells me, it is the every-day term for " noose," but in the Dictionarium Britannico-Latinum of John Davies (1632), besides the entries magi, laqueus, maglu illaqueare, we find magi macula, while in the Latin -Welsh section macula is rendered magi in the sense of spot, speckle or blemish. The Maen Magi is mentioned s.v. glain neidr in Pughe, A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (1830), ii. p. 65, and this author quotes the proverbial Welsh phrase, " what, are they blowing the gem } " applied to people laying their heads together in conversation, an allusion to the way in which such stones were thought to be manufactured by the snakes. Reference to the Maen Magal, Glein Neidr, and the Cornish Mel-pref or Mil-pref is made in a letter dated 1699 of Edward Lhwyd, the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, published in Rowlands, Mona Antiqua Restaurata (London, 1766), p. 318.

I may perhaps be allowed to take the opportunity of making the following addenda to my notes :

To note 4, p. 268. Hunt, loc. cit., mentions a variant specimen of the Cornish stone which was " a beautiful ball of coralline lime-stone, the section of coral being thought to be entangled young snakes."

To note 4, p. 270. Aelian states that Aristotle and Nicander were his authorities. The passages referred to must be Aristotle,