138 THUNDER AND LIGHTNING. 



gether impossible to obtain by any modification of 

 the sun's direct light, but it answers many other 

 important purposes in the economy of nature. 

 When the sky is darkened with clouds, even to the 

 deepest gloom of a close November day, and over 

 the black earth or the barren moor, which drinks up 

 all that falls upon it, the little fragment of solar light, 

 that glimmers by countless refractions and zigzags 

 through the little drops that compose the thick 

 clouds, has no resemblance whatever to moonlight. 

 The fact is, that those little drops decompose 

 the light, as well as retain and reflect back again a 

 considerable portion of it ; and the light which 

 reaches the earth at those times is a melee of little 

 rainbows, each probably not so broad as a spider's 

 thread, in which one colour so falls upon and blots 

 another that the compound has hardly any colour 

 at all. 



We know little of those matters ; but as dry air 

 is as perfect a non-conductor of electricity as dry 

 glass, it is exceedingly probable that when clouds 

 arrive at a certain degree of density, they actually 

 extract their own lightning out of the sunbeams ; 

 and that that which gleams and strikes, and makes 

 air strike against air with as loud a sound as if rock 

 were dashed against rock, or mountain against 

 mountain, is nothing more than the red light, and the 

 heating and oxidizing rays of the sun, collected by the 

 minute drops of water, and tempered by one of those 

 curious processes in Nature's chymistry which hu 

 man skill cannot imitate. 



The subject is one upon which it is altogether 

 impossible to have experimental information ; but 

 as thunder and lightning are among the most striking, 

 and, according to circumstances, among the most 

 sublime, and even the most terrific of natural ap- 

 pearances, it is altogether impossible to observe 

 nature without speculating about them ; besides, the 

 countries where there is the greatest heat and the 

 wannest seasons are those in which there is most 



