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106 THE MAGIC OF JEWELS AND CHARMS
time
lecturer on chemistry at Dartmouth College, his testimony is worth
heeding, but there can be no doubt that while he accurately describes
what he found, he was altogether mistaken in supposing that the meteor
fell precisely on the spot where he discovered the gelatinous
substance. As we have noted, it has recently been suggested that these
"jellies ' ' are plasmodia of forms of Myxomycètes which do not appear
to have any connection with the spot whereon they rest, but seem to
have fallen from the air.64
Falling
stars are explained by the natives of Labrador and of Baffin's Bay as
being souls of the departed bound on an excursion to Hades in order to
see what is going on there, while the phenomena of thunder and
lightning are caused by a party of old women, who quarrel so violently
over the possession of a seal that they bring the house down over their
heads and shatter the lamps. These " old women " must, of course, be
spirits of the upper air, not human beings.86
In
some Australian tribes the sorcerers, or " medicinemen, ' ' taking
advantage of the superstitious dread of falling stars common among the
aborigines, pretend to have marked the spot where such a star has
fallen and to have<dug it up and preserved it in their medicine-bag.
These supposititious "fallen stars" are sometimes quartz pebbles, and
in one instance the curiosity of a European investigator was satisfied
by the display of a piece of thick glass, which the sorcerer strictly
maintained he had dug out of the ground wherein the star had fallen.68
Arrow-heads
encased in silver were looked upon as the solid contents of the
lightning flash, and were not only thought to protect the house in
which they were kept from
·* Edward E. Free in Nature, Nov. 3, 1910, No. 2140, vol. ixxxv. " Arnaldo Faustini, " Gli Eschimesi," Torino, 1912, p. 41. N Edward M. Curr, " The Australian Races," Melbourne and London, voi. Ui, p. 29.
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