advance loans on the deposit of jewels, which
they take without giving any receipt for them.
This being portable property, which can be
carried away or hidden, does very well. Many
of the finest jewels of the Kajar family,
the reigning dynasty, have been pawned and
lost in this way. There is another trade more
venturesome, chiefly managed by Armenians,
as in Turkey. They lend money to persons
about the court to enable them to purchase
governorships of provinces, and the fearful
extortions we often hear of in the East are
practised chiefly for the emolument of these terrible
usurers. There is no escape from them; for they
contrive by judicious presents, and crafty
management, to render all who can be of use to
them their protectors; and the haughtiest of
the Oriental satraps is usually but a mere
puppet in the hands of some Armenian
pawnbroker, to satisfy whose demands gold is wrung
out of the blood and sweat of the miserable
population inhabiting countries which a good
government might render an earthly paradise.
In the reign of Mahomet-Shah a firman was
issued limiting interest on money to twelve
per cent per annum, but nobody paid attention
to it.

It is still customary to weigh money in Persia.
The nominal value and the real worth of coins
often differing very widely, from the practice of
clipping and defacing. Russian gold coins, in
many parts of Persia, are more numerous than
tomauns, although the Russian gold is of an
inferior quality to the Persian tomaun, which is,
when undefaced, a very pretty and a very pure
piece of money. As no reliance can be placed
on the value of any coin after it has once been
put in circulation, and as some of the devices
for sweating it are too ingenious for discovery
except by the test of actual weights and scales,
accounts are involved in much confusion, and
there is great trouble in effecting a just settlement
with anybody. Shawls, which are usually
given as presents, are a kind of currency, the
seller binding himself to take them back at a
fixed price.

THUNDER.

JOHN MILTON, in his description of the opening
of the gates of Pandemonium, says, they
"on their hinges grate harsh thunder that
the lowest bottom shook of Erebus," and so
limited is the geographical range of thunder
when compared with the range of English literature,
that his poem of Paradise Lost is now read
in countries, the untravelled natives of which
have no idea, from their personal observation or
experience, of the nature of the sound called
thunder. The aërial clothing, in which the planet
earth travels in space, differs so vastly in different,
regions, that there are climates in which the
sound of thunder is never heard, and climates in
which, on the contrary, listening ears may hear
the celestial bass continually and perpetually.
Like the song of a bird, thunder has its range.
The traveller due north, when he crosses the
border between England and Scotland, leaves the
songs of the nightingales behind him; and when
he passes Labrador, where the shore larks breed
among the stones and lichens, Spitzbergen and
Nova Zembla, or from the sixty-fifth degree to
the parallel of the seventy-fifth degree north
latitude, the clouds cease to growl forth their
grand old melodies. And it is not only in the
coldest northern latitudes that the clouds become
dumb. Modern observations have not confirmed
the statements of Pliny in reference to Egypt,
nor of Plutarch respecting Ethiopia; but the
inhabitants of Lima, in Peru, never hear thunder
nor see lightning. "If I cannot name," says M.
Arago, "any place within the warm or temperate
regions of the old continent where thunder is
never heard, it is quite otherwise in America.
The untravelled inhabitants of Lima, in Peru,
can, from their own experience, form no idea of
thunder. And they are equally unacquainted
with lightning, for even noiseless and sheet
lightnings never appear in the atmosphere of
Lower Peru, which, although often misty, never
shows true clouds."  A consideration which
makes the limitations of the range of thunder
and lightning appear more wonderful is the fact
that, wherever there is rubbing there is electricity,
or the pushings and pullings of invisible
influences, observed first by the ancient Greeks
as characteristics of amber or electron. Whenever
matter is disturbed, mechanically, chemically,
or calorifically, repulsions and attractions
occur; and yet, on the east coast of Peru, and
in the Arctic regions, friction in the air never
produces thunder and lightning, whilst the name
of the Acroceraunian mountains signifies the
mountains of the thunder-storms. And such is the
variety of nature, that the colour of lightning is
different in different atmospheres. The colour
is generally dazzling white, and is often yellow or
blue in our summer skies, whilst in thin pure hot
air it is violet or rose colour. During the trade-
winds thunder-storms are almost unknown.

Local causes determine greatly the geography
of storms. At Paris, the mean number of thundery
days is fourteen, and at Denainvilliers it is
twenty-one, a year. I know not whether or no
recent observations have confirmed the opinions
of Mr. Dillwyn, who, in the beginning of
this century, maintained that where there
were many metallic mines, as at Swansea
and in North Devonshire, storms are very rare,
and where there occurred few or no mines,
storms were comparatively frequent. He was
also of opinion that storms were more
frequent in limestone than in other countries.
Where there is iron in the rocks, as in greenstone,
it has been supposed to have some effect
in dispersing thunder-clouds. M. Arago, who
thought the neighbourhood of mountains a cause
of storms, was of opinion that their frequency
lessens as we sail from land until a certain
distance is reached, far out at sea, where they never
occur.