and the like, have been softened, and bent,
and twisted, but not melted.

Beyond the thunderbolts of ordinary talk—
which mean simply lightning flashes that
strike the earth—there are real and actual
thunderbolts found in several parts of the
globe; ponderable and tangible bodies;
masses filled inside with a smooth and
brilliant glass, something like vitreous opal,
which cuts glass and strikes fire by a steel.
These bodies having been subjected to an
ignominious disclaimer, Monsieur Hagen, of
Königsberg, came forward as their
demonstrator. During a storm at Rauschen, a
thunderbolt fell on a birch-tree, leaving two
narrow and deep cavities in the ground near
the tree. Monsieur Hagen, digging very
carefully round one of these cavities, came
upon a perfect thunderbolt: a pearly-grey,
vitreous mass, covered with small back spots.
The wonderful chemical change and
decompositions which electricity makes in all
organic bodies are too technical and too
numerous for description here.

The mechanical effects of electricity are
tremendous. Trees torn up by their roots,
large masses of rock hurled great distances,
houses flung to the ground like packs of
children's cards, roofs and walls and furniture
strewn in a helpless medley together, are
a few of the ordinary mechanical effects of
lightning, when it strikes anything on earth.
Under the physical effects are ranged the
carbonisation or burning of combustible
bodies; the wonderful manner in which trees
are sometimes barked, and the wood
rendered friable, and like dust; in animals, the
loss of sight and hearing; paralysis, and
apoplexy; though this last group ought rightly
to be ranked under vital or pathological effects.

The most terrible storm on record is,
perhaps, one which occurred at the small
village of Châteauneuf les Moustiers, in the
department of the Basses-Alpes. During
service, the village church was struck by three
masses of fire, falling in succession. Nine
people were killed, eighty-two were wounded;
all had paralysed limbs, as well as other
maladies. The curé of Moustiers, who had
come over to assist at mass, was found,
after the first confusion had subsided,
lifeless, scarred with numerous surface
wounds, and paralysed. His garments were
torn, the gold lace of his stole melted, and
the silver buckles of his shoes broken and
thrown to the other end of the church. It
was with great difficulty that he was
recovered, but he suffered from his wounds for
two long months, during which time he
never slept; and his arms were paralysed
for ever. The church was filled with a thick
black srnoke through which the only light to
be seen was from the flaming of the burning
clothes of the poor creatures struck. A
young child was torn from its mother's arms,
and flung about six paces from her; a youth,
at that moment chanting the epistle, felt as
if seized by the throat, and then was flung
outside the church door; the rnissal was
torn from his hands, and riven to pieces.
All the dogs in the church were killed as
they lay or stood; and the officiating priest
alone, clothed in silk, received no hurt.
The dogs were all killed, as we said, for
lightning strikes animals in preference to
men; and numberless instances are to be met
with of animals which have been struck, and
human beings left harmless, in a storm,
though, perhaps, the horse has had a rider,
the ox a driver, the cow a milker, and the
dog a master in the act of caressing him, as
the lightning fell. Nothing, indeed, is so
inexplicable to us as the choice which the
lightning seems to make. Among a crowd
of persons perhaps one or two will be struck
and the rest saved; between two, one will
lie dead not five feet from the other, left
unharmed. In a stable where there were
thirty-two horses in a line, those at the two
extremities only were touched. The lightning
passed innocuous over the intervening thirty.
This was at Rambouillet, in seventeen
hundred and eighty-five; and, in eighteen
hundred and eight, at Kronan in Switzerland,
five children were sitting in a row on a
bench, when a thunderstorm broke out, and
a flash of lightning killed the first and the
last, leaving the centre three unhurt, beyond
a somewhat rough shaking. And of five
horses in a line, the first and last two were
killed, while the middle one, an old blind
Dobbin, eat his hay without molestation.
But this is a well-known electric law, if not
a well-understood one; the first and last in
a chain always feeling the shock the most
powerfully, while in a metallic tube there is
always most damage and most impression
where the lightning or electric current has
made its ingress and egress.

A thunderbolt falling in a powder magazine,
sometimes simply scatters the powder
about, without setting it on fire, as happened
at Rouen on November the fifth, seventeen
hundred and fifty-five, and at Venice on the
eleventh of June, seventeen hundred and
seventy-five. But this is as rare as it is
incredible. Most frequently the powder is
set alight, and the whole place is blown into
the air. There was a fearful instance of this
at Brescia, in seventeen hundred and
sixty-nine, when lightning, falling on a powder
magazine, containing above two millions of
pounds of gunpowder, belonging to Venice,
the magazine exploded, and the sixth part
of Brescia was destroyed by the shock; the
rest of the city being much shaken and
damaged; and above three thousand people
killed.

Photographers may recognise in the following
anecdotes a greater graphic power in the
violent action of lightning than in that of still
light. In September, eighteen hundred and
twenty-five, the brigantine II Buon Servo,