earches in Egypt, another line
of observation and thought was slowly developed, even more fatal to the
theological view.

From a very early period there had been dug from the earth, in various
parts of the world, strangely shaped masses of stone, some rudely
chipped, some polished: in ancient times the larger of these were very
often considered as thunderbolts, the smaller as arrows, and all of
them as weapons which had been hurled by the gods and other supernatural
personages. Hence a sort of sacredness attached to them. In Chaldea,
they were built into the wall of temples; in Egypt, they were strung
about the necks of the dead. In India, fine specimens are to this day
seen upon altars, receiving prayers and sacrifices.

Naturally these beliefs were brought into the Christian mythology and
adapted to it. During the Middle Ages many of these well-wrought stones
were venerated as weapons, which during the "war in heaven" had been
used in driving forth Satan and his hosts; hence in the eleventh century
an Emperor of the East sent to the Emperor of the West a "heaven axe";
and in the twelfth century a Bishop of Rennes asserted the value of
thunder-stones as a divinely-appointed means of securing success in
battle, safety on the sea, security against thunder, and immunity from
unpleasant dreams. Even as late as the seventeenth century a French
ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in the museum at
Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Verdun, and claimed for it
health-giving virtues.

In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried to
prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of early
races of men; but from some cause his book was not published until the
following century, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same
idea, and then it had to contend with a theory far more accordant with
theologic modes of reasoning in science. This was the theory of the
learned Tollius, who in 1649 told the world that these chipped or
smoothed stones were "generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation
conglobed in a cloud by the circumposed humour."

But about the beginning of the eighteenth century a fact of great
importance was quietly established. In the year 1715 a large pointed
weapon of black flint was found in contact with the bones of an
elephant, in a gravel bed near Gray's Inn Lane, in London. The world in
general paid no heed to this: if the attention of theologia