590 
Memoranda of Flood and Storm [October, 
packet, bound for Jersey, on that memorable occasion, must 
be consigned to the limbo of the great sea-serpent seen at 
Oban and the phantom ship of the Lagoons. Nor does it 
seem probable that this could have been an earthquake 
wave, or that any earthquake occurred about the 30th of 
March. 
There appears no reason why the statistics of tide-guages 
should not appertain to the department of Solar Physics as 
much as the statistics of river-metres do ; but I do not know 
any authority on the subject. Gewitter and Ziindende Blitze, 
however, distinctly fall into Dr. Hahn’s prolegomena, and 
storms and terrible lightnings we have of late experienced 
with a vengeance. Indeed the transit from June to July has 
been as wholly made over to the suzerainty of summer 
lightnings as the identical Romeo and Juliet period in 1878 
was. Immersed in the exhaustive sultriness of an Italian 
solstice, our eyes have grown blear in watching the fantastic 
shapes of the mountainous clouds ever looming like ghouls 
of destruction on the horizon, menacing us from every 
quarter, and stretching out unawares their leaden wings 
over the expanse of summer blue. Incessantly a lurid light 
with hideous glare has vexed the repose and sparkle of the 
landscape. Electricians say that there is most free electri- 
city in the air about sunrise and sundown, and least at noon ; 
but we have experienced a day discharge and a night dis- 
charge, and the nerves of our ears are in unison with the 
patter of hail and the roar of the mill-race down the gutter. 
Several churches have been damaged by lightning, one being 
St. Botolph’s at Cambridge, and many individuals have 
perished through an imprudence in sheltering beneath trees; 
houses in certain streets have been fired, leaving us to accuse 
the telegraph-wires, or quite as likely bad ventilation, judging 
from the propensity Old Nick has for coming down the 
chimney ; and in one case the rifle of a sentry on duty has 
proved a fatal conductor of the eleCtric fluid. Barns and 
stores have been fired, and a holocaust of cattle destroyed. 
Had no worse calamities befallen us as a nation, the tale of 
disaster would be dire even divested of the imaginary. 
On the afternoon of June 21st, when the thermometer 
stood at no great height, a thunderstorm passed over 
Guildford. On the 24th a slight earthquake was experienced 
in Cornwall — a more serious affair than a slight trembling 
I felt at Maida Hill a few years ago, as would appear. 
During the night of the same day Cambridgeshire — a name 
suggestive of vaporous exhalations — became the centre of 
eleCtiical disturbance ; and the next day the lightning passed 
