In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried
to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements
of early races of men; but from some cause his book was not
published until the following century, when other thinkers had
begun to take up the same idea, and then it had to contend with
a theory far more accordant with theologic modes of reasoning in
science. This was the theory of the learned Tollius, who in 1649
told the world that these chipped or smoothed stones were
"generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a
cloud by the circumposed humour."
But about the beginning of the eighteenth century a fact of
great importance was quietly established. In the year 1715 a
large pointed weapon of black flint was found in contact with
the bones of an elephant, in a gravel bed near Gray's Inn Lane,
in London. The world in general paid no heed to this: if the
attention of theologians was called to it, they dismissed it
summarily with a reference to the Deluge of Noah; but the
specimen was labelled, the circumstances regarding it were
recorded, and both specimen and record carefully preserved.
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