504 



EFFECTS OF LIGHTNING. 



[Ch. XX. 



om their place, some 



recorded in these isles. At Funzie, in Fetlar, about the 

 middle of the last century, a rock of 



mica 



some 



in an instant torn by a flash of lightning from its bed, broken 



al smaller fragments. One of these 



ten 



simply turned over. The second, which was twenty-eight 

 feet long, seventeen broad and five feet in thickness, was 

 hurled across a high point to the distance of fifty yards. 



Fig. 39. 



Stony fragments drifted by the sea. Northmavine, Shetland 



I 



K 











Another broken mass, about forty feet long, was thrown still 

 farther, but in the same direction, quite into the sea. There 

 were also many smaller fragments scattered up and down.* 



When we thus see electricity co-operating with the violent 

 movements of the ocean in heaping up piles of shattered 

 rocks on dry land and beneath the waters, we cannot but 

 admit that a region which shall be the theatre, for myriads 

 of ages, of the action of such disturbing causes, might pre- 

 sent, at some future period, if upraised far above the bosom 

 of the deep, a scene of havoc and ruin that may compare 

 with any now found by the geologist on the surface of our 

 continents. 



In some of the Shetland Isles, as on the west of Meikle 

 Eoe, dikes, or veins of soft granite, have mouldered away ; 



* Dr. Hibbert, from MSS. of Eev. Georse Low, of Fetlar. 



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