In the _Achaica_ we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had regarded the Greeks as mighty _stupid_ “for worshipping stones.” But, having reached Arcadia, he adds: “I have changed my way of thinking.”(760) Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the same thing—a crime with which Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans, as they do—one may be allowed to believe in what so many great Philosophers and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an “idiot” by modern Pausaniuses. The reader is referred to the _Académie des Inscriptions_, if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the standpoint of magic and psychic powers. In a poem on “Stones” attributed to Orpheus, these stones are divided into Ophites and Sideritês, the “Serpent‐stone” and “Star‐stone.” The Ophitês is shaggy, hard, heavy, black, and has _the gift of speech_; when one prepares to cast it away, it produces a sound _similar to the cry of a child_. It is by means of this stone that Helenus foretold the ruin of Troy, his fatherland.(761) Sanchuniathon and Philo Byblus, in referring to these “bétyles,” call them “_animated_ stones.” Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the physician Eusebius had asserted before him. Eusebius especially never parted with his Ophitês, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from it, delivered _in a small voice resembling a low whistling_.(762) Arnobius, a holy man, who “from a Pagan had become one of the _lights of the Church_,” as Christians tell their readers, confesses he could never meet with one of such stones without putting it a question, “which it answered occasionally in a _clear and sharp small voice_.” Where, then, is the difference between the Christian and the Pagan Ophitês, we ask? The famous stone at Westminster was called _liafail_, “the speaking stone,” and raised its voice only to name the king that had to be chosen. Cambry, in his _Monuments Celtiques_, says he saw it when it still bore the inscription:(763) _Ni fallat fatum, Scoti quocumque locatum_ _Invenient lapidem, regnasse tenentur ibidem_. Finally, Suidas speaks of a certain Heræscus, who could distinguish at a glance the inanimate stones from those which were endowed with motion; and Pliny mentions stones which “ran away when a hand approached them.”(764)