HAIL STORMS. 
141 
the mountain soils whose older inhabitants scarcely knew this 
plague.* The paragrandini, f which the learned cura/te of 
Idvolta advised to erect, with sheaves of straw set up verti¬ 
cally, over a great extent of cultivated country, are hut a Lili- 
putian image of the vast paragrandini, pines, larches, firs, 
which nature had planted by millions on the crests and ridges 
of the Alps and the Apennines.” J “ Electrical action being 
diminished,” says Meguscher, “ and the rapid congelation of 
vapors by the abstraction of heat being impeded by the influ¬ 
ence of the woods, it is rare that hail or waterspouts are 
produced within the precincts of a large forest when it is 
assailed by the tempest.” § Arthur Young was told that since 
the forests which covered the mountains between the Riviera 
and the county of Montferrat had disappeared, hail bad become 
more destructive in the district of Acqui, || and it appears 
* There are, in Northern Italy and in Switzerland, joint-stock compa¬ 
nies which insure against damage by hail, as well as by fire and lightning. 
Between the years 1854 and 1861, a single one of these companies, La 
Biunione Adriatica, paid, for damage by hail in Piedmont, Venetian Lom¬ 
bardy, and the Duchy of Parma, above 6,500,000 francs, or nearly $200,000 
per year. 
f The paragrandine , or, as it is called in French, the paragrele , is a 
species of conductor by which it has been hoped to protect the harvests in 
countries particularly exposed to damage by hail. It was at first proposed 
to employ for this purpose poles supporting sheaves of straw connected 
with the ground by the same material; but the experiment was after¬ 
ward tried in Lombardy on a large scale, with more perfect electrical con¬ 
ductors, consisting of poles secured to the top of tall trees and provided 
with a pointed wire entering the ground and reaching above the top of the 
pole. It was at first thought that this apparatus, erected at numerous 
points over an extent of several miles, was of some service as a protection 
against hail, but this opinion was soon disputed, and does not appear to be 
supported by well-ascertained facts. The question of a repetition of the 
experiment over a wide area has been again agitated within a very few 
years in Lombardy ; but the doubts expressed by very able physicists as to 
its efficacy, and as to the point whether hail is an electrical phenomenon, 
have discouraged its advocates from attempting it. 
J Genni sulla Irnportanza e Coltura dei Boschi , p. 6. 
§ Memoria sui Boschi , etc ., p. 44. 
| Travels in Italy , chap. iii. 
