To return to modern times, James Sowerby (1818) gives us an amusing anecdote of the Rev. W. Buckland, who,
"having found a large specimen, was induced by his ardour to carry it himself, although of considerable weight, and being on horseback it was not the less inconvenient; but the inner whorls being gone so as to allow his head and shoulder to pass through, he placed it as a French horn is sometimes carried, above one shoulder and under the other, and thus rode with his friendly companions, who amused him by dubbing him an Ammon Knight."[1]
It is interesting to be able to add that the specimen thus honoured was the original specimen of ammonites Bucklandi, and that it came from one of the many quarries in the Lower Lias limestone of Pennycuick, near Tiverton, Weston, Keynsham, and other places near Bath.
All these snakestones are much of the same kind, but another Elizabethan, Richard Carew, in The Survey of Cornwall (first. ed. 1602), gives us a snakestone of a different kind. His account runs (p. 21): —
"The countrey people retaine a conceite, that the Snakes by their breathing about a hazell wand, doe make a stone ring of blew colour,[2] in which there appeareth the yellow figure of a Snake; and that beasts which are stung, being given to drink of the water wherein this stone has bene socked, will therethrough recover. There was such a one bestowed on me, and the giver avowed to have seene a part of the stick sticking in it: but Penes authorem [sic? auctorem] sit fides!"[3]
But the bridge over which most unmistakably we travel
- ↑ Op. cit., vol. ii., p. 69.
- ↑ I asked Mr. Woodward if he could explain this, and he tells me that these snakestones, which may have come either from Whitby or Lyme Regis, are in many cases found in nodules of blue Lias limestone, which when split would disclose the ammonite within, perhaps a yellow or ochreous specimen, with the ring of blue limestone round it.
- ↑ From The Survey of Cornwall, written by Richard Carew, of Antonie, Esq.: quoted by Parkinson, Organic Remains of a Former World, vol. iii., p. 134, who remarks "among the notions which have been entertained respecting these fossils, none is more curious."
