positive electricity. And from these facts I can
easily infer how, when the winds drive the
globules contained in a cloud which has risen from
the sea, into violent collision with a cloud which
has been gathering on the hills, the friction of
such drops produces lightning: as the rubbing
of a match on a box produces light.

Everything which is up in the blue, has arisen
from the earth, its sublime depths, or its varied
surface; and, just as the universe is composed
of stars and organisms, mineral vegetal and
animal things, ascend into the aërial ocean and
come down from it in multiform and many-
hued showers. Not merely do the volcano and
the sirocco contribute materials to form the
clouds and the strange showers which descend
from them, but the world of plants and the
world of animals help to make the clouds. This
is not the place in which to show the function of
the winds, of clouds, and showers, in sowing the
seeds which, germinating, clothe the earth with
its floral vesture; nor to discuss any of the
questions now agitating speculative botanists
respecting the part they play in reproduction.
But, just because they are wonderful and
marvellous, ought the narratives every now and then
published of showers of red rain or red earth,
of cobwebs or of butterflies, of frogs or of fishes,
to be deemed subjects for investigation and not
of mere denial and ridicule; for, we know very
little as yet, of the lifting power of the whirl-
winds and waterspouts.

Showers of butterflies fall on the sea. I have
often heard sailors and fishermen belonging to
the south coast of England describe the apparition
of these curious clouds of butterflies, miles
out at sea after very changeable winds have for
several days been blowing hard off the land.
Butterflies, during the love season, fly high.
They take wedding trips up into the blue.
When there, they are not seldom caught by the
circling winds, swept together from the skies
above the forests and flowers— and driven out to
sea, where they fall in butterfly showers.

On the 20th January, 1858, the people of
Warsaw believed themselves to be visited by a
shower of insects. The insects were recognised
by Professor Waga to be the larva of a beetle,
Cantharis fusca of Linnæus. They were found
in great numbers crawling upon the snow or
congealed in the ice, in the morning. Severe
cold had been followed by a thaw, and then a
hard frost had come on again during the night of
the nineteenth. When the people saw the
congealed or crawling caterpillars, they believed
they had fallen with the rain. Against this
notion it was argued that if they had fallen with
the rain they must have been carried up
previously; but the forces to lift them, such as the
electrical conditions which produce waterspouts,
are generated only during the periods of great
heat. They were not snow insects like Podura
nivalis, they were insects which do not burrow but
which hybernate in the ground. They feed chiefly
upon spiders, and, having a velvety coat, which
protects them against wet and cold, they go to
sleep among withered grass and dead leaves.
A sudden rise of temperature may rouse them
from their torpor: the rain thus bringing them,
although they do not fall with it from the clouds;
and a sudden frost and snow-fall may overtake
them before they can find their beds of grass
and leaves. This distinction between what
appears with the rain and what falls down with
the rain, is useful to remember.

After a shower of rain or a night of heavy
dew, red mites appear in countless myriads in
the northern provinces of Ceylon. This is the
Trombidium tinctorum, a mite similar to the
little red pillion which is found in garden-mould
in Europe. It feeds on the juices of plants.
This mite looks like a tuft of crimson velvet,
and it soon dyes any fluid with its own tinge.
Whether or no this dyer's mite has anything to
do with the red rain, remains to be ascertained:
as it remains to be found out whether the tinge
has always the same source, and does not come
sometimes from a mineral and sometimes from a
vegetal or animal source. May not red infusoria
sometimes colour the rain as they colour the sea,
and may they not colour it more frequently than
red mites or red earth? The red colour with
which the sea is tinged round the shores of Ceylon
during the south-west monsoon, was ascribed by
Dr. Buist, of Bombay, to the Protococcus or the
Himmatta coccus, which, presenting different
colours at different periods, makes seas of milk
as well as seas of blood. These animalcules,
besides giving its name to the Red Sea, redden
the sea near the shores of South America, and
especially off the coast of California, where they
produce the Vermilion Sea. These red or
vermilion seas are often separated by what seems
a distinct line from the blue or green ocean
around them or beside them, and the contrast is
very singular and striking.

There occur showers of feathers. Snow is
described as showers of feathers by Herodotus,
and when it is snowing, Mother Carey is said
by the sailors to be plucking her goose; but the
showers I speak of are real, and not metaphorical,
showers of feathers. Oddly enough, I may
remark by the way, that the saying of the sailors
seems to be the comical and satirical form
assumed by a myth of the old German mythology,
which described the snow as the feathers falling
from the bed of the goddess Holda when she
shook it in making it. But, as I have said,
showers occur of feathers which are neither
metaphorical nor mythological, but feathers
of birds. " While," says a Captain Blakistan,
"we were in that land of water-fowl below
Cumberland, I witnessed a shower of feathers. As
we sailed up a reach of the river with a fresh
breeze, without the knowledge of a human being
within many miles of us, it appeared to be snowing.
This was nothing more than small feathers,
and we supposed that at some Indian camp in
the swamps to windward, the operation of goose-
plucking must be going on. These feathers had
likely travelled many miles, and would continue
while the breeze lasted." It must have been a
very considerable goose-plucking, indeed, which
could have produced such a shower like snowing,