In this connection, it would be well to read the valuable paper written by Professor O. Montelius, entitled “The Sun-God’s Axe and Thor’s Hammer.” He shows that the superstitious respect paid to the stone celt appears in many countries in the most diverse guises[470]. When stone-axes were unearthed by the plough in Norway, they were regarded as gifts from the gods. It is interesting to turn to the Scriptural account of “the image which fell down from Jupiter[471],” and which was said to represent Diana. Some authorities have considered that the “image” was in reality an aerolite, but Professor W. M. Ramsay contends that it was a rude idol. This writer is of opinion that both the Authorized and the Revised Versions are wrong in giving the translation “Jupiter”; the original refers to an object falling “from a clear sky.” The tradition of images falling from the heavens was common. The image of Cybele, at Pessinus, about which a story of this kind was told, is believed to have been a “shapeless stone[472].” The reader may feel inclined to ask why, by a similar argument, the image of Diana was not likewise a shapeless stone, especially as ignorant folk everywhere are prone to assert that various objects, such as fossil belemnites and lumps of iron pyrites, have dropped out of the firmament. But is there any authenticated instance where an actual image, rather than a natural stone, has been identified as connected with this superstition? The more noticeable fossil remains attracted attention at an early date. The Emperor Augustus decorated his villa at Capri with large fossil bones--“Giants’ bones.” The church was long considered the natural repository for other curious relics. The tusks of fossil animals were commonly placed in Continental churches during the Mediaeval period. Although there existed a collection of fossils in the museum of the Vatican, and although these had been described--inefficiently, it is true--by Michele Mercati, towards the end of the seventeenth century, yet such relics still found a home in the church. Mercati’s manuscript, with its mixture of truth and error, was not, indeed, published by Lancisi until the years A.D. 1717-19, but neither this, nor similar works, made much impression upon the unlettered crowd. Stories soon gathered around the treasured bones or fossils. At the church of Pennant Melangel, in Montgomeryshire, the rib of a mammoth became metamorphosed into a “Giant’s rib,” as well as into a bone of St Monacella[473]. In the Foljambe Chapel of Chesterfield parish church, the jaw-bone of a whale has become a rib of the Dun Cow of Warwick[474] (cf. p. 485 _infra_). A bone is preserved in the church of St Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol, which, report says, belonged to a cow that once supplied the whole city with milk. Other folk, ruthless destroyers of myths, declare, with more reason, that the bone is that of a whale, and was brought from Newfoundland by Cabot. There are many other bones which claim to belong