53 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



would far exceed the limits of this paper. It is my purpose, there- 

 fore, to call attention only to those peculiarly interesting, though 

 usually quite harmless, effects produced by the lightning striking in 

 loose sand ; though, before closing, I shall allude to the closely allied 

 phenomena resulting from similar discharges upon solid rock. In the 

 sand, as is well known, the usual result produced is that of fusion 

 whereby a frail, glassy tube of variable diameter and length is pro- 

 duced, the interior of which is a true amorphous glass, quite smooth, 

 while exteriorly it is roughly granular and greatly corrugated. Such 

 are called fulgurites or fulmination-tubes in English, while, to the 

 German and French, they are known as Blitzrohren and tubes fulmi- 

 naires respectively. 



So far as can be learned from available literature, the earliest de- 

 scription to be made of these peculiar objects was that of Pastor David 

 Hermann in 1711. According to Gilbert,* this gentleman, as early as 

 1706 and 1707, dug from a sand-hill in Massel, Silesia, fulgurites some 

 twenty feet in length, which he very fully described in his work on 

 Massel and its curiosities. 



Hermann's account is curious and full of interest, as his statements 

 concerning the origin of the tubes were the purest guess-work, and his 

 views regarding them wild in the extreme. He designated them by 

 the name " Osteocolla," and proposed to use them for medicinal pur- 

 poses, as will be noted later. 



The earliest account of an occurrence of this kind, where the 

 fusion was indubitably proved to be due to lightning, is that of Mr. 

 Withering, in the " Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Lon- 

 don for 1790." In the narrative as there given, a man, who had taken 

 refuge beneath a tree at Aylesford, England, during a thunder-storm, 

 was instantly killed and his clothing set fire from a flash of lightning, 

 which first struck the upper portion of the tree and thence passed 

 downward toward the ground. A portion of the electric fluid, after 

 leaving the man's body, passed down a walking-stick held in his hand 

 and thence to the ground, where it made a hole some two and a half 

 inches in diameter. The first ten inches of this bole presented nothing 

 worthy of remark ; at this point, however, the fluid was found to have 

 followed along for some eight inches the root of a tree which presented 

 itself, and which, aside from a slight superficial blackening, was un- 

 harmed. Some closely adjacent quartz-pebbles did not, however, 

 escape so easily, but were found with their corners and angles very 

 considerably rounded by fusion. The hole was traced only to a depth 

 of about eighteen inches, and no real tube is mentioned as having been 

 discovered. 



The next account which we have to notice is that given by Dr. 

 Fiedler,! who describes in detail the finding of fulgurites by Dr. 

 Ilentzen and others in the great sand-wastes of Paderborn, coramon- 



* "Ann. dcr Physik.," B. 61, 1819, p. 249. + Ibid., vol. lv, 1817, p. 12L 



