52 PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS. ' 



cipitated to the earth from any other planet, if these ac- 

 counts are believed, and M. Pouillet doubts not the truth of 

 them, then the existence of upward vortices, however these 

 vortices may be formed, is established. (Pouillet, page 

 770.) 1 



83. The theory will also account for the water spout. 

 Indeed, a spout at sea, and a spout on land, are identically 

 the same thing, and many have been known to pass from 

 water to land, exhibiting the same appearance in both situa- 

 tions. To show their identity, I will copy from Silliman's 



1 See Records of Gen. Sci. vol. 4, page 157, for an account of a shower 

 of frogs, three or four layers deep, which fell near Toulouse, described by 

 Professor Pontus. See also Athenaeum, for October, 1840, for the following 

 account, communicated to the British Association. 



Colonel Sykes communicated the contents of a leter from India, from captain 

 Aston, one of the diplomatic agents of the government of Bombay , in Kattywar, 

 on the subject of a recent singular shower of grain. He stated that full sixty 

 or seventy years ago, a fall offish, during a storm in the Madras Presidency, 

 had occurred. The fact is recorded by Major Harriott, in his " Struggles 

 through Life,' as having taken place while the troops were on the line of 

 march, and some of the fish having fallen upon the hats of the European 

 troops, they were collected and made into a curry for the general. This fact 

 for probably fifty years was looked upon as a traveller's tale, but, within the 

 last ten years so many instances have been witnessed and publicly attested, 

 that the singular anomaly is no longer doubted. The matter to which he had 

 to call the attention of the section, was not to a fall of fish, but to an equally 

 remarkable circumstance, a shower of grain. This took place on the 24th of 

 March, 1840, at Rajket, in Kattywar, during one of -those thunder storms, to 

 which that month is subject ; and it was found that the grain had not only 

 fallen upon the town, but upon a considerable extent of country and round the 

 town. Captain Aston collected a quantity of the seed, and transmitted it to 

 Colonel Sykes. The natives flocked to Captain Aston, to ask for his opinion 

 of this phenomenon; for not only did the heavens raining grain upon them 

 excite terror, but the omen was aggravated by the fact that the seed was not 

 one of the cultivated grains of the country, but was entirely unknown to 

 them. The genus and species was not immediately recognizable by some 

 botanists of the Section D , to whom it was shown, but it was thought to be 

 either a spartium or a vicia. A similar force to that which elevates fish into 

 the air, no doubt operated on this occasion, and this new fact corroborates 

 the phenomena, the effects of which had been previously witnessed. 



