Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1875 — Lightning. [ARTICLE]

Lightning.

The last two months have been remarkable for the number of persons who have been killed or injured during them by lightning. Statistics in regard to-this point are not complete, and those that have been gathered show about one person each day struck by this subtle and powerful agent in various parts of the Union, about half as many having been killed as have been merely injured. Death by lightning is not at any time so rare an occurrence as it is commonly thought to be, but electrical disturbances during the present summer have been greater and more frequent than usual. The heavens have been at war with the earth with water and fire, and have succeeded in do ing much injury to. their old antagonist. Floods, hurricanes and cyclones, hail and lightning have wrought uncommon disaster. and. in not predicting the immediate destruction of the world, persons of a prophetif, seventh seal and Millerite ten- [ demy have not shown themselves fully awake to the opportunities of the time. i The “freaks of lightning 1 ’ has become i a common phrase, no other force than electricity ever being guilty of such enormous and wonderful yet common departures from their ordinary working with such terrific effect. If it were possible? for gravitation to indulge in such freaks; if there were cosmical storms in which the worlds were sent whirling through space on the instant, knocking their heads together, and then the cosmical sky should clear off, the nebulae roll away and all be lovely again —if this were possible we should have to seek homes in Mr. Proctor’s “ Other Worlds Than Ours" for peace and quietness. Lightning can never be depended upon to act in any given way; sometimes it appears_as a ballot’ fire rolling along the ground and exploding with a terrific noise, or going quietly into the earth; sometimes it hovers and flashes close to the earth or water; again, in a zig-zag line it leaps from cloqd to cloud, or directly to the earth; sometimes a man is struck and no lightning is seen; sometimes it touches a man and gently melts his watch, doing no other harm; anon it strikes a house, runs down the chimney and, finding nothing of more importance to do, kindly sends a poker .flying through the w indow, melts a copper kettle and then runs down a rat-hole. Its favorite maneuver is to teai- oft' the sole of a man’s boots on its passage to the earth. It has] a peculiar effect —in hastening the decay of animal tissue, and not infrequently the person who is killed by it is almost instantly so far putrefied that he has to be buried at once. It is said, though with what truth we know not, that in the eve of a person struck and killed by the discharge there is always a peculiar impt on the eyeball, produced by the extravasation of blood caused by the sudden expansion and rupture of minute blood-vessels. It was once supposed that neighboring trees were sometimes photographed on the body of the person struck, out recently it has been shown that the appearance of the tree is but the common arborization of electricity which even-one who has noticed a highly-charged Leyden jar has seen, as the electricity escapes into the air or licks arcund to the tin foil on the outside. The same effect may be obtained by discharging lightning over a sheet o glass on which steam has been condensed. The safest place during a thunder-storm is in the center of a room, and if one is very nen-ous he may put tumblers under the legs of the chair on which he sits, for electricity always seeks the path of the least resistance.— N. Y. Graphic.