Protecting Ejects of Great Fires, 279 



of clay, because as the gold, ere long, hardened, it was necessary 

 to break them before it could be extracted. 



Again, in the time of Charlemagne, lo7ig poles were set up 

 in the fields, to disperse the hail and thunder clouds. We must 

 instantly add, however, for without this the enthusiastic admirers of 

 antiquity will find in this passage a manifest proof of the ancient 

 existence of FrankHn'*s lightning conductors — we must add, that 

 the poles were quite inefficient till pieces of paper were placed 

 on their points. Without doubt these papers or parchments 

 were covered with magical characters, since Charlemagne, in 

 proscribing their use, by a capitular in the year 789, describes 

 them as superstitious. 



On the effects of great fires burning in the open air. 



Certain experiments in natural philosophy, the analysis of 

 which will afterwards be published, have led to the suppo- 

 sition that vast fires would conduct to the higher regions 

 of the atmosphere, the greater part of the fulminating matter 

 which is borne along by the clouds. These fires would thus 

 become (such is the opinion of Volta for example) the best 

 means of preventing thunder-storms, or of rendering them 

 scarcely formidable. Let us now examine if observation can be 

 brought to the support of these conjectures. I here lay entirely 

 aside the absurd idea, that the sacrifices to heaven offered by 

 the ancients, that all the flames ascending from the altars, and 

 the black columns of smoke which, from the bodies of the vic- 

 tims, darkened the air — in short, that all the circumstances, and 

 all the ceremonies intended, in vulgar apprehension, to disarm 

 the thundering powers of Jove, constituted simple experiments 

 in natural philosophy, of which the priests alone possessed the 

 secret, and which had truly no other object than the enfeebling 

 and even the gradual and complete destruction of storms. 

 What I would here present is much less fabulous. I record, 

 first, a fact which I owe to the kindness of M. Matteucci. 

 There is a parish, near Cesena in Romagna, of five or six miles 

 in circumference, over the whole extent of which, in consequence 

 of the advice of the curate, the peasants placed at intervals 

 ^€)f fifty feet, heaps of straw and brush-wood. On the ap- 

 proach of a storm, all these heaps of straw, &c. are set 



