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Ovum Anguinum, Druid's Bead

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OVUM ANGUINUM.                             253
This was a thick glass ring, bluish green in colour, having but a small opening. On the exterior circumference were get equidistant projections in blue and white, like eyes. De Boot warns his readers against being taken in by these mysterious-looking objects, stating that in Belgium in his boyhood (about 1555) they were commonly used by women as an ornamental counterpoise to the end of the spindle (" spindle-whorl s "), for which purpose they were manufactured there. These identical articles occasionallj-are turned up in England,* and are still received without question as indubitable Druid's Beads.
In the Middle Ages this wonderful production passed for no more than an antidote against poison, pestilence, bad air, &c. ; but we see from Pliny's notice that anciently the virtues attributed to it were of a much higher and supernatural order—not merely medicinal. It was for the attempt to pervert justice by magical practice that Claudius, " the wisest fool, or the foolishest wise man " (as was said of our James I.), amongst the emperors, put to death the Gallic gentleman who had come armed with one into Court, his cause apparently being tried before the Emperor himself: in which lay the peculiar heinousness of the offence.
The extraordinary appearance of these fossils, often filled up with gold-like pyrites, and inclosed in the heart of large masses of chalk, or lying deep in the solid clay (gault), necessarily rendered them objects of wonder, and perhaps of religious awe, to their ignorant finders, in the days when geology was an unknown science. Even common pebbles, of a more than usually perfect spherical form, seem to have been regarded by the Celts as holy thiugs. It is said that some have boen preserved on the chapel-altars (like
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