40 MADEIRA METEOROLOGIC. PART iv- 



electricity is usually concerned as an addition to mere 

 mechanical and chemical changes. 



There was nothing, indeed, of an ordinary electrical 

 character visible to the simple senses ; no lightning, no 

 thunder, and no " proper " luminosity of the cloud after 

 dark ; while I had no atmospheric electrical instruments 

 with me, and do not prosecute that kind of meteorology. 

 Yet I could not but be struck with a certain degree of 

 resemblance between those elliptical strata of cloud one 

 under or above another, and the well-known stratified 

 arrangement of the illuminated particles of gas, in a so- 

 called gas-vacuum tube when electric induction sparks 

 are passed through it. While at the same time I had 

 not forgotten the remarkable views enunciated by M. 

 Gaston Plante on the Earth's Cosmical Electricity be- 

 fore the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and in his work 

 of 1879, entitled Recherches sur Electricite. 



Perhaps even he, with all his ability as an electrical 

 scientist, might not have hazarded to publish his theo- 

 retical views on the electricity of Cosmos, but for a 

 growing feeling just now in all countries that, however 

 well the electricity of small apparatus in a chamber may 

 be described for educational purposes, there is some- 

 thing further seriously wanted when rules thence derived 

 are applied to nature on an astronomical scale. 



Thus with regard to one of the three admitted kinds 

 of theoretical electrical manifestations, viz. not the 

 electricity of thunderstorms, nor that of the Aurora, but 



