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Ceraunia, Thunder-bolt

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78
NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
setting the fire at defiance,—the last character a proof that he is speaking of the Ruby.
In these gems, therefore, Ceraunia or Ceraunias was no more than an epithet, " Lightning-like," applied to any especially lustrous stone of the Corundum class.
But the second part of Pliny's notice introduces a very different and most curious idea. Isidorus indeed pretends that the gem falls from the sky in thunderstorms, but this is merely a theory coined by himself to explain the name, for he adds êöáííïò in Greek signifies lightning. But Sotacus, as quoted here by Pliny, " makes two other kinds of the Ceraunia (besides those first noticed), the black and the red, resembling axes in shape. Of these, such as are black and round are holy things, cities and fleets can be captured by their means, and they are called Battyli, but those of an elongated form Cerauniae. Others make out a third sort, greatly sought after by the Magi, inasmuch as it is only found in places struck by lightning."
This last remark seems to have been the origin of the etymology of Isidorus referring to gems of a totally dif­ferent character.
The comparison of the second and third class of Cerauniae to axes, at first sight so inexplicable, becomes quite intelli­gible when we recollect that the popular German name to this day for the stone-axes of the primeval Celts is " Donner­keil," or thunder-bolt. Such the country-folks still believe fall from the sky in storms, and are to be dug up wherever the lightning has penetrated the earth. Thor, the Teutonic Jove, is represented armed with a huge stone-hammer, in the place of the classical winged thunderbolt (which, by the way, is always pictured as a double-pointed cone, but equipped with wings). As these primeval weapons are often exhumed in the neighbourhood of old Teutonic temples, it is probable they continued to be used as sacri-
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