inches deep, and two and a half wide. Dr.
Withering, examining the spot only a few
minutes after the accident, saw only in the hole
some burnt roots of grass. Lord Aylesford
ordered a small pyramid to be built upon the
spot, with an inscription warning passers-by not
to seek shelter in thunderstorms under trees.
When digging for the foundation, the workmen
observed that the soil forming the sides of the
perforation was blackened to a depth of ten
inches; and two inches lower the quartzose soil
was fused. Dr. Withering sent to the Royal
Society, with a memoir, specimens consisting
of a quartzose stone, one of the corners of which
had been completely fused, a block of sand
agglutinated by the heat, there being no calcarious or
limy matter among the grains, smaller pieces, all
having some hollow part, and a mass having a
hollow part so perfectly fused that the quartzose
matter, after having flowed along the cavity,
presented at the bottom of it a globular appearance.

Lightning sometimes fuses quartz sand into
the form of large vitreous tubes, called
fulgurites. There need be no discussion respecting
this fact, for lightning has been caught
in the act of making its way through sand, of
fusing the sand instantly, and of forming it into
long hollow vitreous tubes, sometimes thirty or
forty feet long. On the 17th of July, 1823,
near the village of Rauschen, in the province of
Samland, near the Baltic, lightning struck a
birch-tree and set fire to a juniper-bush. Several
persons ran to the spot, and observed two deep
and narrow holes, one of which felt warm to the
touch. Professor Hagan, of Königsberg, had
the holes carefully dug round. Nothing
particular was observed in the first, the one which
had felt warm, notwithstanding the rain, nor in
the other, until they had dug more than a
foot down, where a vitrified tube began. The
walls of tube being extremely thin, it was
fragile, and could be taken out only in
fragments an inch or two long. The vitreous
surface was inside, was very shining, of a pearl-grey
colour, and speckled throughout its whole
length with brown spots. But Boyle has
recorded a fact quite as remarkable as any of these
cases of vitrification. "Two large drinking-glasses,
exactly alike, stood side by side upon a
table. Lightning entered the apartment, and
appeared to dart so directly to the glasses that it
seemed as if it must have passed between them.
Neither of them, however, was broken. In one,
Boyle noticed a very slight alteration of the
form; but the other had been so very much
bent (which necessarily implies softening), that
it could hardly stand upright on its base.

The holes which lightning pierces in the
objects it strikes are sometimes very curious. In
August, 1777, lightning struck the church of
the Holy Sepulchre, at Cremona. The iron
cross on the top of the church was broken, and
the weathercock thrown some distance. This
weathercock was made of tinned copper, and
covered with a coat of oil paint. When picked
up and examined, the weathercock was found to
be pierced by eighteen holes, and, what was most
singular, there were nine edges of the holes
standing out at each of the opposite sides!
And yet the opinion of very eminent students
of electricity is, that in this, as in other similar
cases, the whole of the holes were pierced by
a single stroke of lightning!

There is a very singular case on record of lightning
doing precisely the same damage in the
same church in the same month of two successive
years. This occurred to the church of
Antrasme, near Laval. On the 29th of June,
1763, lightning struck the steeple, fused the
gilding of pictures, blackened the decorations
of niches, blackened and half burnt two pewter
sacramental wine-flasks, and drilled two holes in
the credence-table. Of course all these injuries
were repaired; the picture-frames were re-gilt,
the holes were plugged, and the paint-work
repainted. On the 20th of June in the following
year, lightning again struck the steeple and
again entered the church, re-blackening the gilt,
re-burning the flasks, and driving out the plugs.

That lightning can throw heavy bodies
considerable distances with great force is well
known, but few persons have any adequate idea
of the weight of the bodies transported, or of the
force with which they are projected. Two
instances will suffice to show that this power of
lightning is immense. The Rev. George Low,
of Fetlar, in Scotland, says that "at Funzie, in
the parish of Fetlar, about the middle of the
last century, a rock of mica schist, one hundred
and five feet long, ten feet broad, and in some
places four feet thick, was in an instant torn
from its bed and broken into three large and
several lesser fragments. One of these
fragments, twenty-six feet long, ten feet broad,
and four thick, was simply turned over. The
second and larger fragment, twenty-eight feet
long, ten feet broad, and five feet thick, was
projected over an elevated point a distance of
fifty yards. And the largest mass of the three,
about forty feet long, was sent still further, but
in the same direction, and right into the sea.
Lesser fragments were scattered up and down.
Scarcely less surprising was the force with which
lightning split the mizenmast of the Patriote
during the night of the 11th of July, 1852, in
the port of Cherbourg. The mast was split
eighty feet down, and one fragment, six and a
half feet long and about eight inches square at
the thicker end, was driven two hundred and
sixty-two feet and a half, the thick end foremost,
nearly half its length through an oaken
plank one inch thick until stopped by a knot

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