Red Rain 



legal action of ejectment against the ghosts, which, it need hardly 

 be said, drove them effectually away. 



"In 1017 a shower of blood fell in Aquitaine; and Sleidan re- 

 lates that in the year is 53 a vast multitude of butterflies swarmed 

 through a great part of Germany, and sprinkled plants, leaves, 

 buildings, clothes, and men with bloody drops, as if it had 

 rained blood. We learn also from Bateman's ' Doome ' that 

 these 'drops of bloude upon hearbes and trees' in 1553 were 

 deemed among the forewarnings of the deaths of Charles and 

 Philip, dukes of Brunswick. 



" In Frankfort, in the year 1296, among other prodigies, some 

 spots of blood led to a massacre of the Jews, in which ten thou- 

 sand of these unhappy descendants of Abraham lost their lives. 



" In the beginning of July, 1608, an extensive shower of blood 

 took place at Aix, in France, which threw the people of that place 

 into the utmost consternation, and, which is a much more im- 

 portant fact, led to the first satisfactory and philosophical expla- 

 nation of this phenomenon, but too late, alas! to save the Jews of 

 Frankfort. This explanation was given by M. Peiresc, a cele- 

 brated philosopher of that place, and is thus referred to by his 

 biographer, Gassendi: 'Nothing in the whole year 1608 did 

 more please him than that he observed and philosophized about, 

 the bloody rain, which was commonly reported to have fallen 

 about the beginning of July; great drops thereof were plainly to 

 be seen, both in the city itself, upon the walls of the church-yard 

 of the church, which is near the city wall, and upon the city walls 

 themselves; also upon the walls of villages, hamlets, and towns, 

 for some miles round about; for in the first place, he went him- 

 self to see those wherewith the stones were coloured, and did what 

 he could to come to speak with those husbandmen, who, beyond 

 Lambesk, were reported to have been affrighted at the falling of 

 said rain, that they left their work, and ran as fast as their legs 

 could carry them into the adjacent houses. Whereupon, he found 

 that it was a fable that was reported, touching those husbandmen. 

 Nor was he pleased that naturalists should refer this kind of rain 

 to vapours drawn up out of red earth aloft in the air, which con- 

 gealing afterwards into liquor, fall down in this form; because 

 such vapours as are drawne aloft by heat, ascend without colour, 

 as we may know by the alone example of red roses, out of which 

 the vapours that arise by heat are congealed into transparent 



301 



