First, as to the belemnite, the Scottish geologist Hugh Miller, in The Old Red Sandstone,[1] remarks that he
"was told by one of the workmen . . . that there was a part of the shore . . . where curiously-shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up; and that in his father's days the country people called them thunder-bolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy in curing bewitched cattle." [On visiting the spot Miller] "found one of the supposed aërolites" [he] "had come in quest of, firmly imbedded in a mass of shale." [It proved to be a belemnite.]
Again, the earliest Scottish mention I have been able to find is in 1703, when Martin, in A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland[2] speaking of Strath and Trotterness in Skye, remarks:—
"The Velumnites, (sic) grows likewise in these Banks of Clay, some of 'em are twelve Inches long, and tapering towards one end, the Natives call them Bat [i.e. "Bot"] Stones, because they believe them to cure the Horses of the Worms which occasion that Distemper, by giving them Water to drink in which this Stone has been Steept for some Hours."
There is of course no mention here of thunderbolts.
At Whitby, according to Robinson,[3] the term thunderbolt applied to "the petrified remains of a kind of cuttle-fish, in the Whitby Lias, resembling tubes of various lengths and thicknesses tapering to a point." The comparison here made between the "thunderbolt" of this kind and a tube is not quite accurate, since a tube is generally considered to be hollow, whereas these fossils are, with the exception of a small and shallow cavity at the upper end, perfectly solid, and may be more suitably compared to a cigar than to a tube. I may add that the Greek Belemnon, whence they get their name, means dart or javelin, and is connected with the verb "ballein," to cast.
