Scottish Magical Charm-Stones or Curing-Stones

Throughout all past time, credulity and superstition have constantly and strongly competed with the art of medicine.

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Excerpt:

There is no doubt, according to Pliny, that the magical art began in Persia, that it originated in medicine, and that it insinuated itself first amongst mankind under the plausible guise of promoting health. In proof of the antiquity of the belief, this great Roman encyclopaedist cites Eudoxus, Aristotle, and Hermippus, as averring that magical arts were used thousands of years before the time of the Trojan war.

Assuredly, in ancient times, faith in the effects of magical charms, amulets, talismans, etc., seems to have prevailed among all those ancient races of whom history has left any adequate account. In modern times a belief in their efficiency and power is still extensively entertained amongst most of the nations of Asia and Africa.

In some European kingdoms, also, as in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, belief in them still exists to a marked extent. In our own country, the magical practices and superstitions of the older and darker ages persist only as forms and varieties, so to speak, of archaeological relics,-for they remain at the present day in comparatively a very sparse and limited degree. They are now chiefly to be found among the uneducated, and in outlying districts of the kingdom. But still, some practices, which primarily sprung up in a belief in magic, are carried on, even by the middle and higher classes of society, as diligently as they were thousands of years ago, and without their magical origin being dreamed of by those who follow them.

The coral is often yet suspended as an ornament around the neck of the Scottish child, without the potent and protective magical and medicinal qualities long ago attached to it by Dioscorides and Pliny being thought of by those who place it there.

Is not the egg, after being emptied of its edible contents, still, in many hands, as assiduously pierced by the spoon of the eater as if he had weighing upon his mind the strong superstition of the ancient Roman, that-if he omitted to perforate the empty shell-he incurred the risk of becoming spell-bound, etc.?