ia, Holland, Belgium, France, Cambodia, Sumatra,
and Siberia. They're called "storm stones" in Lausitz; "sky arrows" in
Slavonia; "thunder axes" in England and Scotland; "lightning stones" in
Spain and Portugal; "sky axes" in Greece; "lightning flashes" in Brazil;
"thunder teeth" in Amboina.

The belief is as widespread as is belief in ghosts and witches, which
only the superstitious deny today.

As to beliefs by North American Indians, Tyler gives a list of
references (_Primitive Culture_, 2-237). As to South American
Indians--"Certain stone hatchets are said to have fallen from the
heavens." (_Jour. Amer. Folk Lore_, 17-203.)

If you, too, revolt against coincidence after coincidence after
coincidence, but find our interpretation of "thunderstones" just a
little too strong or rich for digestion, we recommend the explanation of
one, Tallius, written in 1649:

"The naturalists say they are generated in the sky by fulgurous
exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumfused humor."

Of course the paper in the _Cornhill Magazine_ was written with no
intention of trying really to investigate this subject, but to deride
the notion that worked-stone objects have ever fallen from the sky. A
writer in the _Amer. Jour. Sci._, 1-21-325, read this paper and thinks
it remarkable "that any man of ordinary reasoning powers should write a
paper to prove that thunderbolts do not exist."

I confess that we're a little flattered by that.

Over and over:

"It is scarcely necessary to suggest to the intelligent reader that
thunderstones are a myth."

We contend that there is a misuse of a word here: we admit that only we
are intelligent upon this subject, if by intelligence is meant the
inquiry of inequilibrium, and that all other intellection is only
mechanical reflex--of course that intelligence, too, is mechanical, but
less orderly and confined: less obviously mechanical--that as an
acceptance of ours becomes firmer and firmer-established, we pass from
the state of intelligence to reflexes in ruts. An odd thing is that
intelligence is usually supposed to be creditable. It may be in the
sense that it is mental activity trying to find out, but it is
confession of ignorance. The bees, the theologians, the dogmatic
scientists are the intellectual aristocrats. The rest of us are
plebeians, not yet graduated to Nirvana, or to the instinctive and suave
as differentiated from the intelligent and crude.

Blinkenberg gives many inst