THE MICROSCOPE. 



snow and green snow, red rain and black rain ? 

 We thought, perhaps, that we were fully war- 

 ranted to give up to the scoffer, Livy's old stories 

 of showers of blood descending in the Forum 

 and Capitol, and of earth being rained down 

 upon the streets in Kome (Livy, xxxiv. 45) ; 

 but the tidings of rain and snow red, black, 

 and green came from so many quarters, and 

 were vouched for by so many respectable autho- 

 rities, that our early scepticism began to sit 

 somewhat uncomfortably upon us. At length 

 the Microscope has rendered a large portion of 

 it perfectly untenable. Illustrations are here 

 very numerous. 



Thus on January 31, 1687, a great mass of a 

 black substance, said to be like paper, fell during 

 a storm in Courland. The wise said it was 

 meteoric matter, but most men wondered, and 

 pronounced the event a mystery. Fortunately, 

 a portion of the " black mass" was laid up in the 

 Berlin Museum, to puzzle the learned for one 

 hundred and fifty years. But more fortunately 

 still, at the end of that long dark age, Ehrenberg 

 one day applied his Microscope to the marvel, 

 and found it to be a matted heap of minute 



