FRANKUN ON LIGHTNING. 577 



and high trees, lofty towers, spires, masts of ships, chim- 

 neys, etc., as so many prominences and points, draw the 

 electrical fire and the whole cloud discharges there. 



"Dangerous therefore, is it to take shelter under a tree 

 during a thunder-gust. It has been fatal to many, both 

 man and beasts. 



"It is safer to be in the open field for another reason. 

 When the clothes are wet, if a flash in its way to the 

 ground should strike your head, it may run in the water 

 over the surface of your body; whereas if your clothes are 

 dry, it would go through the body, because the blood and 

 other humors containing so much water are more ready 

 conductors. Hence a wet rat cannot be killed by the ex- 

 ploding electrical bottle, when a dry rat may." 



The great generalization is here yet encumbered with 

 a tremendous "if." The course of orderly evolution from 

 his very first experiment, which proved the capacity of 

 points, when placed in the vicinity of electrified bodies, to 

 draw off the electric fire noiselessly and quietly, had now 

 led him to the belief that the same result would happen if 

 the electrified body were a cloud and the point a tree or 

 spire; if lightning and electricity were the same, if both 

 were under control of the same laws. 



But where was the physical proof? Where was the 

 evidence that clouds are ever electrified, or that the fire in 

 the sky is an electric flash, or that there is in fact any 

 electricity in the atmosphere at all ? He had merely sup- 

 posed all this. No one knew better than he that the sea- 

 born clouds, bursting with electrical fire, floated about 

 only in his imagination. No one could better anticipate 

 the derision which would be provoked by the unsupported 

 assertion that the fierce blazes of the thunder-gust lay 

 latent in the soft depths of the snowy couriers of the air, 

 ready to obey the same control as the little sparks and 

 crackles yielded by his globes and jars. There was the 

 crux, //"the lightning be electricity, then but is jt? 



How was that to be found out? 

 37 



