In the rock of St. Gowan’s chapel in Wales was a natural cavity upon which the name of the Expanding Stone was bestowed by popular tradition, because the strange fancy prevailed that this stone automatically adapted itself to the size of anyone who entered the cavity. The legend ran that once, during the Pagan persecutions, when a fugitive Christian, hotly pursued, reached this rock it opened up of its own accord so that he could slip into it, and then closed about him so as to hide him effectually from his enemies. This Expanding Stone was believed to manifest its magic power by bringing to pass the wish expressed by anyone who entered it, provided he did not change his wish while he turned around within it.[[74]]
The natives of the French colony of New Caledonia in the southern Pacific, attach special importance to the fortuitous shape of stones in using them for talismans or amulets. According to their form such stones are considered to procure favorable effects against famine, madness, or death; to induce sunshine or rain, or else to bring good luck in fishing or in sailing, each special use being suggested by some different form, the color also being in some cases a determining factor. For the purpose of securing a better yield from fruit-trees a stone having the approximate shape of the fruit or with markings similar to those on fruit or tree is the one indicated by nature as the appropriate talisman, as in the case of the cocoanut palm, where a stone marked with black lines is the one chosen. Sometimes two different talismanic stones are used in this practice, a smaller one figuring the unripe fruit; when the tree begins to bear, the small stone is buried at its foot, and as soon as the fruit begins to mature, the small stone is removed and the larger one, representing the ripe fruit, is buried in its place.[[75]]
The Scotch of a century or more ago are said to have considered that an isolated stone or boulder, firmly fixed in the earth, possessed powers of a peculiar sort, and some such stones were used to cure bruises and strains and reduce swellings.[[76]] As it was also thought that a blow from a stone of this type was especially hurtful, this would be another case of homœopathic treatment of which so many and various examples are afforded by the superstitious use of stones and gems, as well as of other objects to which certain advantageous qualities were attributed.
Small stone boulders have been made use of by ejected peasants in Fermanagh, Ireland, in a magical incantation designed to draw down a curse upon a merciless landlord. For this purpose the peasant would collect a number of such stones, pile them up on his hearth as he would have piled turf sods, and then put up a petition that all manner of bad luck and misfortune might befall the landlord and his descendants to remote generations. Hereupon he would gather up the stones again, and, carrying them off, would scatter them about in bog-holes, pools or streams, so that they should never be brought together again.[[77]] This was evidently done in the belief that the curse could only be raised if a counter-invocation were pronounced over the same collection of stones. An allusion to a custom of turning stones about while reciting a formula of malediction is contained in the following lines by Dr. Samuel Ferguson:
They hurled their curse against the King,
They cursed him in his flesh and bones,
And even in the mystic ring,
They turn’d the malediction stones.
Of all “magic stones” none seem better to deserve this designation than those mysterious and fascinating mineral specimens, veritable lusus Naturæ, bearing imprinted upon them by nature’s hand some likeness of the human face or form. The grandeur and the overwhelming power of the material world are probably as much or even more felt in our prosaic age than they were in the earliest times, but this sentiment is sometimes coupled with a sense of distrust—happily neither general nor permanent—as to the presence in this tremendous and inspiring aggregate of forces of any distinct and definite evidence of the working of an intelligence closely similar to our own. It seems not unlikely that to this half-distrust is in great part due the fascination exercised by these naturally designed stones. We know, indeed, that when examined critically by the mineralogist, their strange markings become explicable as the results of fortuitous stratifications and juxtapositions, but to our instinctive appreciation they offer so close and startling an analogy to the artistic reproductions consciously made by the hand of man, guided by his experience and intelligence, that we are almost invariably impressed with a keener sense of our kinship with nature.
Some very characteristic and interesting specimens of these natural designs were at one time in the possession of Queen Victoria, many of them having been formerly among the treasures in the valuable and extensive collection of pearls and precious stones carefully gathered together by the famous banker and connoisseur, Henry Philip Hope. Quite recently (April 20, 21, 1914) these objects, which had passed into the J. E. Hodgkin Collection, were sold at Christie’s in London. Perhaps the most remarkable is thus described by B. Hertz in the Hope Catalogue:[[78]]