X 
PROCEEDINGS OE THE 
a house was struck by lightning, and a servant, who was in one of 
the rooms on the ground floor, was terribly horrified at seeing a 
ball of lightning. She rushed out of the room, and through a 
passage. The ball followed, and passed her, and went into a room 
where it burst with a tremendous report. He mentioned that case 
solely as illustrative of the extremely slow motion which is a 
frequent characteristic of ball lightning. As to lightning, a large 
number of persons believed that it came from the clouds to the 
earth, whilst others thought differently. It had lately been urged 
that the motion of a flash of lightning was too rapid for the human 
eye to be sensible of its direction. Mr. Symons did not agree with 
this view, but considered that the above were matters worth the 
attention of members of the Society. 
With respect to imagination, there were wonderful stories told of 
things being photographed on the human body when people had 
been struck by lightning. There was one of an Italian lady who, 
when near a geranium that was on a window-sill, was struck by 
lightning, and an imprint of that flower was afterwards found on 
her arm. Another story was that of a flock of sheep grazing in a 
field near Bristol. They were gathered under a tree, and a flash 
of lightning killed them. Upon their being skinned, marks of trees 
and a view of the surrounding country were supposed to be visible, 
and the skins were publicly exhibited. Recently a boy was struck 
by lightning whilst outside a shed, and the print of a yew tree 
was said to exist on his arm, but fortunately the arm was photo¬ 
graphed and the mark proved to have had nothing in common with 
the yew tree, but to be ramified like the well-known breath-figures. 
The Americans had on the top of one of their mountains a meteoro¬ 
logical observatory, and one of the persons there was struck by 
lightning and a mark of a tree (?) was found on his arm, yet there was 
no tree whatever on the mountain—tolerably strong evidence that 
neither trees nor photography have anything to do with such 
markings. Ramified figures are produced, but they are entirely 
independent of surrounding objects. 
In dealing with thunderstorms it was necessary to allude to what 
were commonly known as thunderbolts. They had often heard 
that a thunderbolt had been found. One he heard of had made 
a hole in a heap of rubbish and was taken out. It was a large 
nodule of iron pyrites, but he did not for one moment wish to 
suggest that the iron came down with the lightning. 
. As regarded hail, they had various opinions as to its formation 
before reaching the earth, and he would ask those present to read 
an extract from the ‘ Monthly Meteorological Magazine ’ for 
December, 1882. He had brought for the use of the members of 
the Society some copies of a paper giving an account of a hailstorm 
at Ober Grainau, Bavaria, on June 4th of last year. They would 
see that Colonel Ward had been devoting considerable attention to 
the forms of hail, and the illustrations would prove of interest, as 
showing the difficulties of satisfactorily explaining the formation of 
the many varieties which had been engraved. 
