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AETITES.
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AETITES. Eagle-Stone.
The lively
fancy of the Greeks discovered in the forms of natural objects
resemblances to other organic forms, and, by a step not very logical,
ascribed to them inherent virtues analogous to this interpretation. Of
this system the Aetites is perhaps the most illustrative
example, and the one also. that the longest maintained its ancient
reputation. Pliny describes four species of it (xxxvi. 21). The first
was egg-shaped, white, and filled with a soft sweet-tasted clay : this
was the female. The second, reddish-coloured externally, contained a
stony substance, and passed for the male. The third was filled with a
sweetish sand. The fourth, the Laeonian, had inside it a crystalline
core, called the Callimus. The best kind were asserted to be
only found in the nests of eagles, which could not breed without their
aid; hence their name. They, for this reason, were of the greatest
benefit to women in labour ; a notion which even Dioscorides appears to
endorse. The substance itself, as the specimens figured by De Boot
plainly show, was one of those calcareous hollow concretions, sometimes
white, sometimes tinged with iron, well known to geologists ; and which
appear to be accidental formations, not petrifactions of older
organised bodies.
The Aetites must not, however, be confounded with another stone named in a fragment of Theophrastus ή lithos των τικ-τοΰσων, " the gem of
parturient women ;" to which he also alludes (in section δ) by, " The
most wonderful and most important property is that of the stones that
bring forth others." This was the Paeonites, described by Pliny
under that name, as reported to conceive at a certain time and bring
forth another ; therefore very serviceable to women in labour ; found
in Macedonia, and in
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