Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 March 1890 — MARVELOUS PHENOMENA. [ARTICLE]

MARVELOUS PHENOMENA.

Blood-Red Rains and a Deluge of Serpents. 1 ;'v At Rome, in 1222, It rained dust, mixed with blood, for three days, and whed the heavy clouds drifted away it looked as if the sun was swimming in a sea of fire, says the Sl. Louis Republic. Four years later, in 1226, a snow fell in Syria, which presently melted and flowed in carmine rivers of blood, or some fluid much resembling it in every particular. Many of the old writers record a three day shower of blood-red rain in the Island of Rhodes and throughout southern Italy in 1236. A monk, writing in 1251, tells of a loaf being cut out of which blood flowed as freely as from a fresh wound. In 1348 there were many great tempests. Several towns and thousands of people were swallowed up and the courses of rivers changed or stopped. Some chasms in the earth sent forth poisonous fluids as red as carmine ink, as at Yillach, in Austria. Ponderous hailstones fell in many parts of Germany the same year, some of them weighing from twenty to seventy pounds. At Lamech it rained flesh, dust, comets and meteors; firebrands and corruscations were in the air; mock suns, with fiery tails, sailed through the skies. Soon after these terrible scenes at Lamech it began at Cataya, near the sea, and went sweeping throughout southern Europe. An ingenious vapor or sulphurous fire broke from the earth at Caabery, Asia, and utterly consumed . beasts, houses dnd trees, so iaiggShg the air that a great plague followed. Young serpents and millions of venomous insects fell "from the clouds. In I|6l Burgundy experienced the novelty of a shower of blood-red rain, which ensanguined everything it touched; and in 1568 the Antiura reapers found all wheat heads to he as red as blood. In 1588 bread put in the oven at Nuremberg was taken out covered with a bloody sweat. Wurtemberg had a shower of brimstone and ashes 1334. In 1695 Limerick and Tipperary, Ireland, h d many showers of a soft, fatty substance resembling butter. It was of a dark yellow color and always fell at night. The. people gathered it and used it as an ointment, reporting many astonishing cures.