of its vibrations, shakes all things, these phrases
have the force and the felicity of truth; which
the other phrases have not.

Nothing is more curious in the phenomena of
lightning than its effects on hair. Lear invokes
the lightning to singe his white hairs, and
whether Shakespeare knew the fact or not,
lightning is influenced by colour, and singes by
preference white hair. An ox of a reddish
colour spotted with white, was struck by lightning,
and not the slightest injury was done to the
red hair, whilst not a hair was left upon the
white spots. These singular effects occurred
twice to two separate oxen, at Swanborough,
in Sussex, in the years 1772 and 1774. On
the 20th September, 1773, at Glynd, a horse
was struck by lightning. He was a
dappled horse. When his owner examined him,
after the attack, all his hair of every other hue
remained fast, while the hair on the white streaks
and spots came clean off at a touch. May not
this difference be caused by the absence of the
colouring matter, or oil, making white hairs
drier and more easily burnt than coloured hair?
There is a case mentioned by Kundmann of
a young girl, the brass bodkin in whose hair
was fused by lightning, and yet her hair was not
burnt.

Captains Peytier and Hossard were, on the
15th June, 1825, in a thunder-storm on the
Pyrenees, which lasted six hours. For a short
time, the tassels in their caps and their hair
stood on end. And on the 31st of August,
1826, they were in a storm in which lightning
struck a ptarmigan hung by one of their guides
by a string upon a wooden pole: the top of the
pole was charred, and the feathers of the bird
were stripped off from the beak to the tail.
Residents in Brighton are not likely soon to forget
the storm which flooded Pool Valley in 1850.
The lightning of that storm burnt a hole, such as
a red-hot rifle bullet might burn, through the
bushy whisker of a man who was out in the
storm. I record this fact on the testimony of
the late Dr. Williamson, from whom I had it,
and to whom the man went immediately with his
scathed cheek.

Father Feyjoo relates, in the Cartas Eruditus,
that lightning passed near a young man named
Juan Francisco Menandez Miranda. He was not
in the least hurt, yet his hair began falling off
immediately afterwards, and in a few days none
remained upon his body.

One more example of the effects of lightning
upon hair. The particulars were supplied by the
sufferer himself to M. Arago. Captain Rihouet
was the second in command of the frigate Golymin,
on the 21st February, 1812, when she was
sailing out of the harbour of L'Orient. The
vessel was struck by lightning, and the captain
received several injuries on the head. "The
next day," he says, "when I wished to shave, I
found that my razor, instead of cutting my beard,
pulled the hairs out by the roots, and since then
I have had no beard. The hair on my head, on
my eyebrows, and on my eyelashes, all the hair
on my body, in fact, came gradually away by the
roots, and did not grow again. The nails on my
fingers scaled away during the following year
(1813), but those on my feet underwent no
change."

Thus without the invocation of any Lear,
lightning singes white hair. There is indeed no
reason for supposing that the hair of the young
Juan Miranda was white; but there are young
people who inherit a predisposition to baldness,
while the captain was no longer young, and the
red oxen and the dappled horse lost none, but
the hairs on their white spots. It is scarcely,
moreover, necessary to remind the reader of the
physiological analogy between feathers and hairs;
or that the winter plumage of the ptarmigan is
pure white. Belonging to the grouse, partridge,
and quail group, this bird is called the "white
grouse."

These facts point to a most interesting and
enchanting region of scientific research, into
which I cannot enter the chemistry of lightning.
Chemists can produce, whenever they choose,
substances, one of which shines with a pale and
almost perpetual light, another of which needs
only to be exposed to the air to glow brilliantly,
and a third which flames forth the moment it
touches water or ice; and the preferences or
apparent caprices of lightning, the selection of
metals and colours or a colour, seem to be analogous
phenomena. Chemistry, electricity, and
caloric touch each other so closely, that there
can be no difficulty in admitting the common
belief that certain trees are more liable to be
struck by lightning than others, but what these
trees are is still an unsettled question. Men
who fell forest timber, from the splits they find,
infer that trees of all kinds are much more
frequently struck by lightning than is generally
supposed. The Chinese deem the mulberry and
the beech good preservatives against lightning.
The epithet "oak-cleaving," which Shakespeare
applies to the thunderbolt, has been supported
by observers, who have said that the oak, the
elm, the pine, and the chesnut are often, the ash
rarely, and the beech, birch, and maple never,
struck. The laurel, it was believed, was never
scathed by lightning. Tiberius, on this account,
wore a laurel crown, and no doubt found it
cooler and safer than any metal one would have
been. Modern observation, however, supplies
us with no reasons for believing that any tree
whatever is absolutely safe from lightning.

Most of the trees and shrubs which I have
examined, after they have been struck by lightning,
have been cleft or shattered by it, but in a garden
at Preston, near Brighton, I saw in 1859 certain
shrubs, some nailed up against the wall and
others alone, which seemed blighted, shrivelled,
withered, scorched, as if the lightning had dried
up their sap or cambium. The effects have
generally been merely mechanical, but in this
instance they were chemical. The shrubs had
not been struck, they had been blasted. The