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MAGIC STONES AND ELECTRIC GEMS 47
scatter them about in bog-holes, pools or streams, so that they should never be brought together again.77
This was evidently done in the belief that the curse could only be
raised if a counter-invocation were pronounced over the same collection
of stones. An allusion to a custom of turning stones about while
reciting a formula of malediction is contained in the following lines
by Dr. Samuel Ferguson :
They hurled their curse against the King, They cursed him in his flesh and bones,
And even in the mystic ring,
They turn'd the malediction stones.
Of
all "magic stones" none seem better to deserve this designation than
those mysterious and fascinating mineral specimens, veritable lusus Naturœ, bearing
imprinted upon them by nature's hand some likeness of the human face or
form. The grandeur and the overwhelming power of the material world are
probably as much or even more felt in our prosaic age than they were in
the earliest times, but this sentiment is sometimes coupled with a
sense of distrust —happily neither general nor permanent—as to the
presence in this tremendous and inspiring aggregate of forces of any
distinct and definite evidence of the working of an intelligence
closely similar to our own. It seems not unlikely that to this
half-distrust is in great part due the fascination exercised by these
naturally designed stones. We know, indeed, that when examined
critically by the mineralogist, their strange markings become
explicable as the results of fortuitous stratifications and
juxtapositions, but to our instinctive appreciation they offer so close
and startling an analogy to the artistic reproductions consciously
made by the hand of man, guided by his experience
"Lean's
Collectanea (by Vincent Stuckey Lean), vol. ii, Pt. I, Bristol, 1903,
p. 476; see W. F. Wademan in Jour. Roy. Hist, and Arch. Assoc, of
Ireland, July, 1875.
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