Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/427

 Snake Stones. 1 1 9

Be mirabilibus auscultationibus, cxv. and Nicander, Theriaca, 37. The latter calls the stone Tayyin^a rrkxp-qv, with the result that the schoHast confuses it with yayarrys, " jet," which came not from the East, but from Lycia. To the gagate, however, is ascribed similar properties with regard to serpents by Phny, Nat. Hist., xxxvi. 141, and the Orphic Lithica (ed. Abel) 474, and it was supposed to be used by eagles on account of its cold- ness to prevent their eggs from getting cooked by the extreme heat of the parent bird's body, Bode, Scrip. Rer. Myth. (1834),

p. 75-

The earliest authority for snake stones in East Africa who is known to me is Friar Jordanus {circa 1330), The Wonders of the East, ed. Yule (Hakluyt Society, 1863), pp. 41 ■43- In India Tertia, which is East Africa south of Abyssinia, he reports at second hand the existence of snakes with jewels inside them and also of dragons with carbuncles on their heads. This latter is, of course, another example of the blazing jewel crest, for the carbuncle is regularly the magically luminous stone of the Middle Ages. Thus in a familiar story, most frequently told of Gerbert or Vergil, the subterranean treasure chamber guarded by the talismanic statue of the archer is magically illuminated by a single great carbuncle [ciTGesta Romanorum, ed. Swan, No. cvii. p. 185 ; Comparetti, Vhrgil in the Middle Ages, p. 307). A, , -, W. R. Halliday.

The Indian Antiquary.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Indian Antiquary, Sir Richard Temple, Bt., who for thirty- seven years has been the Editor-proprietor, has written a short account of the history of the magazine which has had among its contributors many great Indian and Oriental scholars in India itself as well as all over Europe and America. The object of the Indian Antiquary has been to provide a means of com- munication between the East and the West on subjects con- nected with Indian research, and a medium to which students and scholars, Indian and non- Indian, could combine to send notes and queries of a nature not usually finding a place in the