feet above his fields to the highest point he
could reach; but the cobwebs seemed still as
much above him as before, still descending into
sight successively, and always twinkling in the
sun.

However much may remain unexplained in
the showers made by spiders, they are
invested with no such difficulties as those which
bristle around the showers of frogs and fishes.
As for the frogs, I have thought about what
I have heard and read of them until I have
felt dead beat. I have read stories about their
being found alive in holes, in the centre of blocks
of marble where they could not have found any
entrance nor any air. A letter from a naturalist
fell under my eye while turning over the leaves
of a volume of the Zoologist, declaring that three
frogs had been found alive under a bed of stiff
brick clay fourteen feet thick, near Bridgewater,
in 1859. And not content with puzzling me with
their subterranean doings, these provoking
reptiles are said to come down from the skies in
showers. The testimony in favour of frog
showers is so perplexing that I sometimes feel
persuaded to throw all incredulity and love of
proof to the winds, and believe not merely in
showers of frogs and fishes, but that the sky
sometimes, according to the Scottish saying,
"rains auld wives an' pike staves." Mr. Edward
Jesse says he was once witness to a swarm of
frogs—of very small frogs—consisting of many
thousands just out of the tadpole state—which
suddenly made their appearance in the garden of
a house he occupied at Fulham, although the
entrance to the garden was through his house,
although the garden was completely surrounded
by a high wall, although the soil was dry gravel
without any moist place in which spawn could
have been deposited, although there were no
drains communicating with the garden, and
although it had been well trenched and no frogs
found. Mr. Loudon is said to have seen a
similar occurrence at Rouen. Quite recently,
M. Dezautiere, a physician of Decise, in the
department of the Nievre, sent to the Academy
of Sciences at Paris, an account of a frog
shower which he had received from an eye-
witness of that shower. This eye-witness was
a public functionary, an inspector of highways
and bridges. Being one day overtaken
by a shower, he took refuge in a house. The
rain fell fast and heavily, and he and all who
were in the room in which he had found
shelter, saw many frogs fall down the chimney
and upon the hearth. Amazed at this
circumstance, the inspector and the occupants of
the house went out when the storm was over
and found many covering the ground like those
which had fallen upon the hearth. I doubt
if statements, of which these are only samples,
are as satisfactorily as they are cavalierly
disposed of, by the in-door naturalists who say that
young frogs always jump about after rain in
certain seasons of the year.

Showers of frogs are less hard to believe
than showers of fish. Like all the other great
groups of animals, fish have become more
marvellous while growing less fabulous. They
were all said to be dumb thirty years ago, and
now some of them are said to be decidedly
musical. It is now known that peasants dig
down into the earth for fish, in Ceylon: the fish
being found in holes or tunnels which extend
some distance from the river banks. There are
fish who indulge in journeys on the land, and
climb trees. There are fish in hot springs; a
fact which is not made less surprising by the
fact that there are men, and women too, always in
hot water! In hot eastern climes the land will
be seen shrunk and cleft one day, and a few
days afterwards the fishermen will be seen on
those very spots dipping down their hands into
the water, and catching fish in baskets,
afterwards carrying them by driving canes through
their gills.

And there is a vast, if not an overwhelming
mass of testimony in support of the occurrence
of fish showers in different climates. Mr.
J. Prinsep, the Secretary of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal, took a fish out of the pluviometer at
Calcutta in 1838. Mr. Whiting, long resident
at Trincomalee, was often told by the natives
that on that side of the island of Ceylon it
frequently rained fishes, and once himself saw many
small fishes in a field, after two hours' rain, where
there were none when he passed over it in the
morning. Mr. Cripps, of Galle, had seen fish
taken from rain-water, accessible to no stream or
tank, and where either the fish or the spawn of
the fish must have fallen with rain. "Fish,"
says Dr. Buist, "fell in 1824 at Meerut on the
men of the Fourteenth Royal Regiment, then
out at drill, and were caught in numbers."
Cyprinidæ fell during a storm at Moradabad in
July, 1826. It is a fact attested by the depositions
of nine different parties, that on the 19th
of February, 1830, a heavy fall of fish took place
at the Nokulhatty factory in the Daccah zillah,
having been first seen in the sky like a flock of
birds, and then descending rapidly amidst
drizzling rain. Fish, some of them of the kinds in
the neighbouring tanks, and some weighing from
one pound and a half to three pounds each, fell
dead and dry after a storm on the 16th and 17th
of May, 1833, in the zillah of Futtehpoor, three
miles north of Jumna. Dead and dry chowla
fish fell at Allahabad during a storm in May,
1835. "I was driving," says Sir J. Emerson
Tennent, " in the cinnamon gardens near the fort
of Colombo, and saw a violent but partial shower
descend at no great distance before me. On
coming to the spot, I found a multitude of small
silvery fish, from one and a half to two inches in
length, leaping on the gravel of the high road,
numbers of which I collected and brought home
in my palankin. The spot was about half a mile
from the sea, and entirely unconnected with any
watercourse or pool." The ground around
Rajkote was found literally covered with fish,
and some were found even upon the tops of hay-
stacks, during a tremendous deluge of rain—
one of the heaviest falls on record— on the 25th
July, 1850. Full half a mile from any stream,
after a very heavy fall of rain, multitudes of