164 THE MAGIC OP JEWELS AND CHARMS
sure to have timely notice, if any poisoned food or drink were offered to him.5 The writer who mentions this adds the following tale of the discovery of a toad-stone :
A
clerk once found a toad which had a round knob on its head, wherefore
he thought that there must be a toad-stone. So he took up the toad and
tied it firmly in the sleeve of his coat. When he returned from the
fields and searched for the toad he found it not, although the sleeve
of his coat was tightly bound below and he could not discover any
opening through which the creature could have passed. This shows us
that it is a great help to prisoners in jail.
Another early authority, Thomas de Cantimpré, says of the toad-stone:
If
one take the stone from a living and still quivering toad a little eye
can be seen in the substance; but if it be taken from a toad that has
been some time dead, the poison of the creature will have already
destroyed this little eye and spoiled the stone.
If the toad-stone be swallowed at meal-time it passes-through the system and carries off all impurities.6
Here the substance may have been one of many concretionary
materials,—bauxite, impure pearls, concretionary limestone,
stalagmite, or even the eye-stones from the crawfish ; indeed, any
material, white or gray, that had a semblance to a toad color, and was
then sold by the vendor of charm stones as coming from a toad's head.
The
great Erasmus (1465-1536) made a pilgrimage to the famous shrine of the
Virgin in the church at "Walsing-ham, in Kent. In his description of
what he saw there he expressly notes a wonderful toad-stone:
At the feet of the Virgin is a gem for
which there is as yet no Latin or Greek name. The French have named it
after the toad [crapaudine], because it represents so perfectly the
figure of a toad that no art could do this
'"Le Grand Lapidaire de Jean de Mandeville." From the edition of 1561, ed. by J. S. del Sotto, Vienne, 1862, p. 90.
* In Konrad von Megenberg^ " Buch der Natur," ed. by Dr. Franz Pfeiffer, Stuttgart, 1861, p. 437.
