1 38 THUNDEEBOLTS 



gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it down from 

 the clouds with a simple door-key, somewhere near Phila- 

 delphia ? and does not Mr. Eobert Scott (of the Meteoro- 

 logical Office) calmly predict its probable occurrence within 

 the next twenty-four hours in his daily report, as published 

 regularly in the morning papers ? This is lightning, mere 

 vulgar lightning, a simple result of electrical conditions 

 in the upper atmosphere, inconveniently connected with 

 algebraical formulas in x, y, z, with horrid symbols inter- 

 spersed in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of 

 Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra 

 hurls down upon the head of the trembling malefactor 

 how infinitely grander, more fearsome, and more myste- 

 rious ! 



And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large 

 number of well-informed people, who have passed the sixth 

 standard, taken prizes at the Oxford Local, and attended 

 the dullest lectures of the Society for University Extension, 

 but who nevertheless in some vague and dim corner of their 

 consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the 

 existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in 

 its entirety the simple truth that lightning is the reality of 

 which thunderbolts are the mythical, or fanciful, or verbal 

 representation. We all of us know now that lightning is 

 a mere flash of electric light and heat ; that it has no solid 

 existence or core of any sort ; in short, that it is dynamical 

 rather than material, a state or movement rather than a 

 body or thing. To be sure, local newspapers still talk 

 with much show of learning about ' the electric fluid ' 

 which did such remarkable damage last week upon the 

 slated steeple of Peddlington Torpida Church ; but the 

 well-crammed schoolboy of the present day has long since 

 learned that the electric fluid is an exploded fallacy, and 

 that the lightning which pulled the ten slates off the 



