Now, here is a case the complete opposite of the preceding ones and still more curious, in which the capricious and fantastic lightning attacked the epidermis without burning the hair which covered it.
At Dampierre thunder broke over a house belonging to M. Saumois. His arm, one leg, and the left side of his body were burnt, and the extraordinary thing is that the skin of the arm was burnt leaving the hair intact.
A little further on we shall have cases where the lightning has proved salutary in certain forms of illness.
Generally the people who are struck fall at once without a struggle.
It has been proved by a great number of observations that the man who has been struck by lightning so as to lose consciousness immediately falls without having seen, heard, or felt anything. This is easy to believe, since electricity is animated by a movement much quicker than that of light, and still more so than that of sound. The eye and ear are paralyzed before the lightning and the thunder could have made an impression on them; so much so that the victims, when they recover themselves, are unable to explain what has happened to them.
People struck by lightning nearly always sink on the very spot where they have been struck. Besides this, we have already remarked several cases where the people struck have preserved the exact positions they had at the moment of the catastrophe.
But, on the other hand, we can quote some examples, rarer, but diametrically opposed to these.
On July 8, 1839, lightning struck an oak near Triel (Seine-et-Oise), and also struck two quarrymen, father and son. This last was killed dead, raised, and transported twenty-three yards away.
The surgeon Brillouet was surprised by a storm near Chantilly, and was raised by the lightning and deposited twenty-five paces from where he had been.
On August 18, 1884, at Namur (Belgium), a man was flung ten yards from the tree under which he had been struck by lightning.