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]