At Bayonne, on June 6, 1873, lightning knocked over a gas-burner, and threw a person down, after making her turn round three times. A family of twelve were gathered together at a table, sixty yards, at least, from the point where it burst. They were all knocked down, but without sustaining any injury.
During a violent storm, lightning entered a country house by the chimney; it lifted two big stones from the hearth, and carried them over to near the head of a child who was asleep, and placed one on each side, without grazing it or hurting the child.
And this same lightning, whose almost maternal delicacy is quite exquisite, entered another time, also by the chimney, into a house, hit a man savagely on the head, wounded him severely, and left him dead in the middle of a pool of blood. Then it took a quantity of this blood which was accumulated round his head, and went and stuck it on the ceiling of the higher story. A child who was present at this tragic scene was unhurt.
In August, 1901, an electric spark penetrated into a house in the village of Porri, near Ajaccio, and started to make the tour of the property. First it visited the second-floor rooms, without doing much damage there; then it went down to the first floor, where there were two young girls, turned them round, and burnt their legs. It continued on its course as far as the cellar, where its dazzling brightness terrified three young children who had taken refuge there. It spared two, but burned the third rather severely.
Let us finish this series of electric pictures, which depict—sometimes in a very tragic manner—the different modes of activity of one of the grandest of Nature's phenomena, by two facts, the strangeness of which surpasses everything that one can imagine.
Pliny gives the case of a Roman lady, who, having been struck by lightning during her confinement, had a stillborn child, without herself suffering the least harm.
Another:—
The Abbé Richard, in his Histoire de l'Air, gives a more extraordinary case still. At Altenbourg, in Saxony, in July, 1713, lightning struck a woman who was expecting her confinement. She was delivered some hours afterwards of a child who was half burnt, and whose body was all black. The mother recovered her health.
We can neither define nor delimit the power of lightning. Sometimes merciful, often cruel, it constitutes in the universality of its actions, one of Nature's most terrible scourges.