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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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