1. = THUNDERBOLT 1. arch.
1598. Marston, Pigmal., IV. Enuie, let Pines of Ida rest alone, For they will growe spight of thy thunder stone.
1601. Shaks., Jul. C., I. iii. 49. I … Haue bar’d my Bosome to the Thunder-stone.
1678. Dryden & Lee, Œdipus, IV. i. You merciless powers, Hoard up your thunder-stones.
1819. Shelley, Prometh. Unb., IV. 341. Sceptred curse … sending A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones.
1888. Lowell, Heartsease & Rue, 70. Splintered with thunder-stone.
2. Applied to various stones, fossils, etc., formerly identified with ‘thunderbolts,’ as celts, belemnites, masses of pyrites, meteorites: = THUNDERBOLT 3.
1681. Grew, Musæum, III. I. i. 258. Thunder-Stone or hard Button-Stone. Brontias. So called, for that people think they fall sometimes with Thunder.
1703. Maundrell, Journ. Jerus. (1721), 52. Each tube had a small cavity in its Center, from which its parts were projected in form of rays, to the circumference, after the manner of the Stones vulgarly call’d Thunder-stones.
c. 1710. Celia Fiennes, Diary (1888), 218. Ye oare as its just dug Lookes like ye thunderstone.
1778. Encycl. Brit. (ed. 2), II. 1090/1. Belemnites, vulgarly called thunder-bolts or thunder-stones.
1796. Morse, Amer. Geog., II. 16. Norway produces … amethysts, agates, thunder-stones, and eagle-stones.
1802. Howard, in Phil. Trans., XCII. 169. Because explosion and report have generally accompanied the descent of [meteorolites], the name of thunderbolt, or thunderstone, has ignorantly attached itself to them.
1907. Q. Rev., July, 176. The ‘thunderstones’ were of human workmanship.
3. poet. Applied to a (? stone) cannon-ball.
1821. Shelley, Hellas, 370. The … allies Fled from the glance of our artillery Almost before the thunderstone alit.
