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Examples
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We have not, it must be noted, any specimens of the toad-stone at the present day actually known to have been brought from Coptos.
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The name alone -- simply the name "Batrachites," the Greek for toad-stone -- was sufficient to lead the fertile imagination of the mediæval doctors to invent all the other particulars!
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All these and the Echites, or viper-stone, were credited with extraordinary magical virtues, and many of the assertions of later writers about the toad-stone are clearly due to their having calmly transferred the marvellous stories about other imaginary stones to the imaginary toad-stone.
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_ A single detached tooth or "toad-stone" seen from the bright unattached surface. _b.
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"Since that time," he says, "I have always regarded as humbug ( 'badineries') all that they relate of the toad-stone and of its origin."
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Shakespeare himself was simply making use of what was considered to be "common knowledge" in his day when he made the Duke compare adversity to the toad with a magic jewel in its head commonly known as "a toad-stone," although that "common knowledge" was really not knowledge at all, but -- like an enormous mass of the accepted current statements in those times, about animals, plants and stones -- was an absolutely baseless invention.
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He then describes the actual stone which passes as the toad-stone, or "_Bufonius lapis_," and says that it is also called batrachite, or brontia, or ombria.
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Hence came a true test for such stones, according to the same credulous author, who thus enlightens us: -- “To know whether the toad-stone called _crapaudina_ be the right and perfect stone or not, holde the stone before a toad so that he may see it, and if it be a right and true stone, the toad will leap toward it, and make as though he would snatch it from you.”
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Fig. 139 is curious, not only as containing the true toad-stone, but also that the stone is embossed with the figure of a toad, according to the description of
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But the most curious of all these superstitious beliefs attached itself to the _crapaudine_, or toad-stone.
Gammerstang commented on the word toad-stone
(noun) - (1) A popular name for bufonite, from the fact that it was formerly supposed to be a natural concretion found in the head of the common toad. Extraordinary virtues were attributed to it, such as protection against poison, and it was often set in rings. That this belief was rife in Shakespeare's day is proved by the lines from As You Like It, "Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head."
--Robert Hunter's Encyclopædic Dictionary, 1894
(2) You shall knowe whether the toad-stone be the right and perfect stone or not. Holde the stone before a toad so that he may see it, and if it be a right and true stone, the toad will leape towarde it and make as though he would snatch it. He envieth so much that man should have the stone.
--Thomas Lupton's A Thousand Notable Things, 1579
(3) Virginia-frog, a frog that is eight or ten times as big as any in England, and makes a noise like the bellowing of a bull.
--John Kersey's New English Dictionary, 1772
January 14, 2018