A jelly-like mass believed by him to be the remains of a “fallen star” was found by Mr. Rufus Graves at Amherst, Mass., on August 14, 1819, and duly reported in the American Journal of Science.[194] As this gentleman was at one time lecturer on chemistry at Dartmouth College, his testimony is worth heeding, but there can be no doubt that while he accurately describes what he found, he was altogether mistaken in supposing that the meteor fell precisely on the spot where he discovered the gelatinous substance. As we have noted, it has recently been suggested that these “jellies” are plasmodia of forms of Myxomycetes which do not appear to have any connection with the spot whereon they rest, but seem to have fallen from the air.[195] Falling stars are explained by the natives of Labrador and of Baffin’s Bay as being souls of the departed bound on an excursion to Hades in order to see what is going on there, while the phenomena of thunder and lightning are caused by a party of old women, who quarrel so violently over the possession of a seal that they bring the house down over their heads and shatter the lamps. These “old women” must, of course, be spirits of the upper air, not human beings.[196] In some Australian tribes the sorcerers, or “medicine-men,” taking advantage of the superstitious dread of falling stars common among the aborigines, pretend to have marked the spot where such a star has fallen and to have dug it up and preserved it in their medicine-bag. These supposititious “fallen stars” are sometimes quartz pebbles, and in one instance the curiosity of a European investigator was satisfied by the display of a piece of thick glass, which the sorcerer strictly maintained he had dug out of the ground wherein the star had fallen.[197] Arrow-heads encased in silver were looked upon as the solid contents of the lightning flash, and were not only thought to protect the house in which they were kept from being struck by lightning, but their protective power was believed to extend to seven houses in the immediate neighborhood. An interesting example is a neolithic silex arrow-head figured by Bellucci. This has been elegantly set in silver in modern times, and comes from Pesca Costanzo, in the province of Aquila, Italy. The Italians are convinced that if the arrow-head, or similar object, come in contact with a piece of iron, the “essence of the lightning” departs from it, revealing itself in a spark; hence they wrap it up, carefully, in skin, cloth, or paper so as to guard it from harm. Sometimes these objects are anointed with oil, a survival of the custom of making propitiatory offerings of oil. This usage in the case of sacred stones is very general, and is met with in places as remote from each other as Sweden, India and the Society Islands.[198]