Fairy Rings. 117 



I hold to be strokes of electricity : and I owe you " the 

 pickuig of a crow," good Mrc Loudon, for refusing, some 

 time ago, the admission of a gentleman's Essay on Electricity, 

 averring it incompatible with Natural History; when you 

 very well know that no part of organised nature can go on 

 a moment without it, and that no part of inorganised matter* 

 exists, not subject to its pervasive influence. 



A very considerable portion of those volleyed lightnings and 

 rolhng " thunder, that deep and dreadful organ-pipe," which 

 often keep such awful coil and " pother o'er our heads," has 

 frequently very little or nothing to do with us; for though 

 a nimbus be heavily discharging its rain, cumuli are bagged 

 up in different heights the lobed and thin edges of which may 

 be often seen through the shower, tinged by the flash ; as 

 one cloud is giving or receiving the fluid, according as it is 

 more or less disposed. This may be proved by theory : but 

 I have very often witnessed it, safely seated on the tops of 

 very high mountains, in the calm and quiet sunshine and 

 sweet serenity of a blue sky : and some who read this article 

 will remember witnessing it with me on the craggy heights 

 of the Glissegs, and even from so low an elevation as the 

 Balder-stone of the Wrekin. But when a column of electric 

 fluid affects the earth, either ascending or descending (for 

 I confidently contend, in the very face of some modern theo- 

 rists, that it ascends innumerously oftener than it descends, 

 though I must not pause to prove it here), it scorches the 

 ground all around its edge, where there is plenty of oxygen 

 in contact with it, and leaves the centre unscathed, where the 

 oxygen is either expelled or destroyed, and so fertilises the 

 extremity : the consequence is, that the first year the grass is 

 destroyed, and the ring appears bare and brown; but the se- 

 cond year, the grass resprings with highly increased vigour 

 and verdure, together with fungi, whose dormant seeds are so 

 brought into vegetation, that without this exciting cause might 

 have slept inert for centuries. These fungi are most generally 

 of the ^garicus, J5oletus, or Lycoperdon, sometimes Clavaria, 

 genus ; I have very rarely seen any other. The fertilisation of 

 combustion, as agriculturists well know, though violent, being of 

 short duration, these circles soon disappear. They are, more- 

 over, generally found in open places, on hill-sides, wide fields, 

 and broad meadows, where lightning is more likely to strike ; 

 and seldom near trees or woods, which throw off, or receive 



* Excepting glass, and a very few others similar ; to which, however, it 

 may be most easily communicated by the intervention of metal, and made 

 to retain it perfectly when the metal is removed. 



I 3 



