wMch Jell in Orkney on the July 1818. 367 
among the hailstones in the direction of the cattle. The loose 
ice,” he says, slipped below his feet, and sometimes, when he 
happened to stumble, reached to his knees. In this way his 
legs were so much cut by its sharp edges, that he was soon 
obliged to desist, and to wait till the ground began to appear, 
by the melting of the hail. The pieces of ice he describes as of 
various shapes : most of them were round like eggs ; many were 
flattened, and not unlike thick clumsy oyster-shells some 
were smooth on the surface, others ragged and jaggy. Some 
of these appearances probably arose from the hailstones being 
partly dissolved, the weather being warm. Mr Taylor like- 
wise remarks, that some were as finely polished as marbles, 
while others were irregular, and apparently made up of pieces 
of conglomerated ice and that the largest lumps he observ- 
ed were about six inches in circumference. Mr Caithness 
thinks, that the largest piece of ice which he lifted, might 
weigh from four ounces to nearly half a pound ; and he de- 
scribes the hailstones as being generally of a greyish-white 
colour, not unlike fragments of light-coloured marble. 
The terrified black cattle and horses, which had broken 
their tethers, and been observed, at the beginning of the fall 
of hail, running violently backward and forward, galloping and 
flinging, had now collected together in a herd. Caithness at 
length made his way to them through the half-melted ice : they 
still trembled exceedingly; some of the horses had lain flat 
down on the grass, with their heads stretched out ; and all of 
the animals were more or less cut, and bleeding. Some of the 
weaker horses, the farmer says, will never recover : the milch 
cows, he adds, were struck yeld^ or gave no more milk, and 
indeed would not suffer the people to attempt to milk them 
any more. 
On the links or downs, at some distance from Caithness'’s 
house, a large flock of tame geese had been feeding : these, he 
remarked, seemed to remain motionless on the turf ; and on 
proceeding to the place, he found many of them wholly de- 
prived of life ; a few were still living, but so much injured, 
that all of them pined away and died in a short time. Some 
of these poor birds had their bills split ; others had an eye 
struck from its socket, and hanging by the nerve ; and the 
