reflect artificial light, and is too soft to allow of carving or ornament. The perilous task of procuring it is carried out by performing the operation after the serpents have been drugged with medicated herbs.[1] The dragon stone acquired by Dieudonné de Gozon—as the result of his combat with the Rhodian dragon—and still preserved by his descendants as a family heirloom at the end of the sixteenth century, was alleged to have been cut from the forehead of the monster.[2] The doctrine that the stone must be taken from the brain of the dragon while it still lived also persisted through the Middle Ages.[3] The dracontia lapis appears to have reached Rome from the East; the West had also its snake stone, the vogue of which has been perpetuated by the authority of the written text of Pliny, in spite of that author's scornful scepticism as to its virtues. His account of the ovum anguinum Pliny had from the Druids of Gaul,[4] through the Natural History it passed to the medieval lapidaries[5] and thence back, perhaps to reinforce a continuous local tradition, to the popular superstition of France and the British Isles.[6] This adder stone, named a milpreve in Cornwall and Maen Magi or Glain Neidr in Wales, was formed by in-
- ↑ Solinus, XXX. 16-18.
- ↑ Hasluck, "Dieudonne de Gozon and the Dragon of Rhodes," B.S.A., XX. pp. 75, 79. It was described as a crystal of the size and shape of an olive and of varied colour. Water in which it was placed bubbled violently while absorbing the virtue of the stone (cf. the Melanesian stone above), and was afterwards given to the patient to drink. A sixteenth century witness describes how a patient after this treatment vomited up a serpent 1½ palms long.
- ↑ Conrad von Megenburg, Buch der Natur (ed. Pfeiffer), 444, §29, cited by Hasluck, op. cit. p. 75, note 4.
- ↑ Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxix. (12),,52-54.
- ↑ Cf. the account of the stone Dreconides given by the fourteenth, century Lapidaire of de Mandeville quoted by Hasluck, B.S.A. xx. p. 75.
- ↑ Sebillot, Traditions et Superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne, ii. 217. Brand, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (ed. Ellis, London, 1893). iii. pp. 286 and 369 foil.; Hunt, op. cit. pp. 220, 221, 222; Trevelyan, op. cit. pp. 170 foll.; Henderson, Northern Counties of England and the Border, p. 165; Johnson, Folk Memory, p. 148; Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 131 and 141 foll.; Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, ii. p. 385.
