CHAPTER II
ATMOSPHERIC ELECTRICITY AND STORM-CLOUDS
With such strange facts before us—facts the strangeness and diversity of which baffle all hypotheses and forbid all definite conclusions—we can but keep adding to our observations and accumulating other facts which may tend to elucidate the mystery. The terrible ravages caused every year by lightning make it necessary for us to find some means of preventing the recurrence of certain memorable catastrophes. It is only in the actual investigation of the phenomenon, in the study of all its smallest manifestations, that we can hope to discover the methods of the mysterious power.
From the earliest times mankind has devoted much thought to the subject. If we glance back towards past centuries we find that thunder and lightning have ever been regarded as a terrible agent of the will of the powers above.
The strongest and subtlest brains of antiquity, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Seneca, were unable to form any kind of reasonable view regarding the fantastic phenomena resulting from the force of nature and held so mysterious to us moderns. Thunder and lightning were generally believed by them to be due to emanations from the earth or to vapours contained in the air.
The Etruscans, who flourished fifteen hundred years before Christ, and who were much given to the study of nature, are said to have observed the tendency of lightning to make for points, but no theory upon the subject has come down to us from them.
Electricity for the ancients was an unplumbed ocean, whose slightest fluctuations affected them in ways they could not understand. In vain they appealed to their gods to help them to explain the enigma. Olympus turned a deaf ear to their prayers.
Their imagination exhausted itself in researches into the nature of such things as amber, in which they recognized the curious attribute of attraction and repulsion for objects of slight weight. The poets attributed it to the tears of Phaëton's sisters, lamenting over the dreams of Eridan. Certain naturalists regarded it as a kind of gum issuing from trees during the dry days. No one gave any thought to electricity, by whose subtle fluid the earth and everything upon it is penetrated and enveloped.
The superstitions connected with lightning would furnish forth material in themselves for a very curious volume of stories—half comic, half tragic.
With the Romans the fall of a thunderbolt was always taken as an omen. In the reign of Domitian, thunder was to be heard once so constantly during a period of eight months that the tyrant, frightened by the bombardment from on high, at last cried out in his terror: "Let the blow come, then, where it will!" The stroke fell upon the capitol, and upon the temple of the Flavian family, as well as upon the emperor's palace and the very room in which he slept. The inscription beneath the triumphal statue was even torn away by the tempest and thrown into a neighbouring garden.