Preternatural RAINS. We have numerous accounts, in the historians of our own as well as other countries, of preternatural rains; such as the raining of stones, of dust, of blood, nay, and of living animals, as young frogs, and the like. We are not to doubt the truth of what those who are authors of veracity and credit relate to us of this kind, so far as to suppose that the falling of stones and dust never happened; the whole mistake is, the supposing them to have fallen from the clouds: but as to the blood and frogs, it is very certain that they never fell at all, but the opinion has been a mere deception of the eyes. Men are extremely fond of the marvellous in their relations; but the judicious reader is to examine strictly whatever is reported of this kind, and is not to suffer himself to be deceived.
There are two natural methods by which quantities of stones and dust may fall in certain places, without their having been generated in the clouds or fallen as rain. The one is by means of hurricanes: the wind which we frequently see tearing off the tiles of houses, and carrying them to considerable distances, being equally able to take up a quantity of stones, and drop them again at some other place. But the other, which is much the most powerful, and probably the most usual way, is for the eruptions of volcanoes and burning mountains to toss up, as they frequently do, a vast quantity of stones, ashes, and cinders, to an immense height in the air: and these, being hurried away by the hurricanes and impetuous winds which usually accompany those eruptions, and being in themselves much lighter than common stones, as being half calcined, may easily be thus carried to vast distances; and there falling in places where the inhabitants know nothing of the occasion, they cannot but be supposed by the vulgar to fall on them from the clouds. It is well known, that, in the great eruptions of Ætna and Vesuvius, showers of ashes, dust, and small cinders, have been seen to obscure the air, and overspread the surface of the sea for a great way, and cover the decks of ships; and this at such a distance, as it should appear scarce conceivable that they should have been carried to: and probably, if the ac-
counts of all the showers of these substances mentioned by authors be collected, they will all be found to have fallen within such distances of volcanoes; and if compared as to the time of their falling, will be found to correspond in that also with the eruptions of those mountains. We have known instances of the ashes from Vesuvius having been carried thirty, nay, forty leagues, and peculiar accidents may have carried them yet farther. It is not to be supposed that these showers of stones and dust fall for a continuance in the manner of showers of rain, or that the fragments or pieces are as frequent as drops of water; it is sufficient that a number of stones, or a quantity of dust, fall at once on a place, where the inhabitants can have no knowledge of the part from whence they came, and the vulgar will not doubt their dropping from the clouds. Nay, in the canton of Berne in Switzerland, the inhabitants accounted it a miracle that it rained earth and sulphur upon them at a time that a small volcano terrified them; and even while the wind was so boisterous, and hurricanes so frequent, that they saw almost every moment the dust, sand, and little stones torn up from the surface of the earth in whirlwinds, and carried to a considerable height in the air, they never considered that both the sulphur thrown up by the volcano, and the dust, &c. carried from their feet must fall soon after somewhere. It is very certain that in some of the terrible storms of large hail, where the hailstones have been of many inches round, on breaking them there have been found what people have called stones in their middle; but these observers needed only to have waited the dissolving of one of these hailstones, to have seen the stone in its centre disintegrate also, it being only formed of the particles of loose earthy matter, which the water, exhaled by the sun's heat, had taken up in extremely small molecule with it; and this only having served to give an opaque hue to the inner part of the congelation, to which the freezing of the water alone gave the apparent hardness of stone.
The raining of blood has been ever accounted a more terrible sight and a more fatal omen than the other preternatural rains already mentioned. It is very certain that nature forms blood nowhere but in the vessels of animals; and therefore showers of it from the clouds are by no means to be credited. Those who suppose that what has been taken for blood has been actually seen falling through the air, have had recourse to flying insects for its origin, and suppose it the eggs or dung of certain butterflies discharged from them as they were high up in the air. But it seems a very wild conjecture, as we know of no butterfly whose excrement or eggs are of such a colour, or whose abode is so high, or their flocks so numerous, as to be the occasion of this.
It is most probable that these bloody waters were never seen falling; but that people seeing the standing waters blood-coloured, were assured, from their not knowing how it should else happen, that it had rained blood into them. A very memorable instance of this took place at the Hague in the year 1670. Swammerdam, who relates it, tells us, that one morning the whole town was in an uproar on finding their lakes and ditches full of blood, as they thought; and having been certainly full of water the night before, they agreed it must have rained blood in the night: but a certain physician
fician went down to one of the canals, and taking home a quantity of this blood-coloured water, he examined it by the microscope, and found that the water was water still, and had not at all changed its colour; but that it was full of prodigious swarms of small red animals, all alive, and very nimble in their motions, whose colour and prodigious number gave a red tinge to the whole body of the water they lived in, on a less accurate inspection. The certainty that this was the case, did not however persuade the Hollanders to part with the miracle: they prudently concluded, that the sudden appearance of such a number of animals was as great a prodigy as the raining of blood would have been; and are assured to this day, that this portent foretold the scene of war and destruction which Louis XIV. afterwards brought into that country, which had before enjoyed 40 years of uninterrupted peace.
The animals which thus colour the water of lakes and ponds are the polices arborecentes of Swammerdam, or the water-fleas with branched horns. These creatures are of a reddish-yellow or flame colour: they live about the sides of ditches, under weeds, and among the mud; and are therefore the less visible, except at a certain time, which is in the end or beginning of June: it is at this time that these little animals leave their recesses to float loose about the water, to meet for the propagation of their species, and by that means become visible in the colour they give the water. This is visible, more or less, in one part or other of almost all standing waters at this season; and it is always at this season that the bloody waters have alarmed the ignorant.
The raining of frogs is a thing not less wonderful in the accounts of authors who love the marvellous, than those of blood or stones; and this is supposed to happen so often, that there are multitudes who pretend to have been eye-witnesses of it. These rains of frogs always happen after very dry seasons, and are much more frequent in the hotter countries than in the cold ones. In Italy they are very frequent; and it is not uncommon to see the streets of Rome swarming both with young frogs and toads in an instant in a shower of rain; they hopping everywhere between the people's legs as they walk, though there was not the least appearance of them before. Nay, they have been seen to fall through the air down upon the pavements. This seems a strong circumstance in favour of their being rained down from the clouds; but, when strictly examined, it comes to nothing: for these frogs that are seen to fall, are always found dead, lame, or bruised by the fall, and never hop about as the rest; and they are never seen to fall, except close under the walls of houses, from the roofs and gutters of which they have accidentally slipped down. Some people, who love to add to strange things yet stranger, affirm that they have had the young frogs fall into their hats in the midst of an open field; but this is idle, and wholly false.
Others, who cannot agree to their falling from the clouds, have tried to solve the difficulty of their sudden appearance, by supposing them hatched out of the egg, or spawn, by these rains. Nay, some have supposed them made immediately out of the dust: but there are unanswerable arguments against all these suppositions. Equivocal generation, or the spontaneous production of animals out of dust, is now wholly exploded. The fall from the clouds must destroy and kill these tender and
soft-bodied animals: and they cannot be at this time hatched immediately out of eggs; because the young frog does not make its appearance from the egg in form, but has its hinder legs enveloped in a skin, and is what we call a tadpole; and the young frogs are at least 100 times larger at the time of their appearance, than the egg from which they should be hatched.
It is beyond a doubt, that the frogs which make their appearance at this time, were hatched and in being long before: but that the dry seasons had injured them, and kept them sluggishly in holes or coverts; and that all the rain does, is the enlivening them, giving them new spirits, and calling them forth to seek new habitations, and enjoy the element they were destined in great part to live in. Theophrastus, the greatest of all the naturalists of antiquity, has affirmed the same thing. We find that the error of supposing these creatures to fall from the clouds was as early as that author's time; and also that the truth, in regard to their appearance, was as early known; though, in the ages since, authors have taken care to conceal the truth, and to hand down to us the error. We find this venerable sage, in a fragment of his on the generation of animals which appear on a sudden, bantering the opinion, and asserting that they were hatched and living long before. The world owes, however, to the accurate Signor Redi the great proof of this truth, which Theophrastus only has affirmed: for this gentleman, dissecting some of these new-appearing frogs, found in their stomachs herbs and other half-digested food; and, openly showing this to his credulous countrymen, asked them whether they thought that nature, which engendered, according to their opinion, these animals in the clouds, had also been so provident as to engender grass there for their food and nourishment?
To the raining of frogs we ought to add the raining of grasshoppers and locusts, which have sometimes appeared in prodigious numbers, and devoured the fruits of the earth. There has not been the least pretence for the supposing that these animals descended from the clouds, but that they appeared on a sudden in prodigious numbers. The naturalist, who knows the many accidents attending the eggs of these and other the like animals, cannot but know that some seasons will prove particularly favourable to the hatching them, and the prodigious number of eggs that many insects lay could not but every year bring us such abundance of the young, were they not liable to many accidents, and had not provident nature taken care, as in many plants, to continue the species by a very numerous stock of seeds, of which perhaps not one in 500 need take root in order to continue an equal number of plants. As it is thus also in regard to insects, it cannot but happen, that if a favourable season encourage the hatching of all those eggs, a very small number of which alone was necessary to continue the species, we must, in such seasons, have a proportionate abundance of them. There appeared about 50 years ago, in London, such a prodigious swarm of the little beetle called the lady-cow, that the very posts in the streets were everywhere covered with them. But thanks to the progress of philosophy among us, we had nobody to assert that it rained cow-ladies, but contented ourselves with saying that it had been a favourable season for their eggs. The prodigious number of a sort of grub which did vast mischief about the same period
period among the corn and grass by eating off their roots, might also have been supposed to proceed from its having rained grubs by people fond of making every thing a prodigy; but our knowledge in natural history assured us, that these were only the hexapode worms of the common hedge-beetle called the cockchafer.
The raining of fishes has been a prodigy also much talked of in France, where the streets of a town at some distance from Paris, after a terrible hurricane in the night, which tore up trees, blew down houses, &c. were found in a manner covered with fishes of various sizes. Nobody here made any doubt of these having fallen from the clouds; nor did the absurdity of fish, of five or six inches long, being generated in the air, at all startle the people, or shake their belief in the miracle, till they found, upon inquiry, that a very well-stocked fish-pond, which stood on an eminence in the neighbourhood, had been blown dry by the hurricane, and only the great fish left at the bottom of it, all the smaller fry having been tossed into their streets.
Upon the whole, all the supposed marvellous rains have been owing to fabricances naturally produced on the earth, and either never having been in the air at all, or only carried thither by accident.
In Silesia, after a great dearth of wheat in that country, there happened a violent storm of wind and rain, and the earth was afterwards covered, in many places, with small round seeds. The vulgar cried out that Providence had sent them food, and that it had rained millet: but these were, in reality, only the seeds of a species of veronica, or speedwell, very common in that country; and whose seeds being just ripe at that time, the wind had dislodged them from their capsules, and scattered them about. In our own country, we have histories of rains of this marvellous kind, but all fabulous. It was once said to rain wheat in Wiltshire; and the people were all alarmed at it as a miracle, till Mr Cole showed them, that what they took for wheat was only the seeds or kernels of the berries of ivy, which being then fully ripe, the wind had dislodged from the sides of houses, and trunks of trees, on which the ivy that produced them crept.
And we even once had a raining of fishes near the coast of Kent in a terrible hurricane, with thunder and lightning. The people who saw small sprats flew all about afterwards, would have it that they had fallen from the clouds; but those who considered how far the high winds have been known to carry the sea-water, did not wonder that they should be able to carry small fish with it so small a part of the way.
In the Philosophical Transactions for 1782 we have the following account of a preternatural kind of rain by Count de Gioeni: "The morning of the 24th instant there appeared here a most singular phenomenon. Every place exposed to the air was found wet with a coloured cretaceous gray water, which, after evaporating and filtering away, left every place covered with it to the height of two or three lines; and all the iron-work that was touched by it became rusty."
"The public, inclined to the marvellous, fancied various causes of this rain, and began to fear for the animals and vegetables."
"In places where rain-water was used, they abstained from it: some suspecting vitriolic principles to be
mixed with it, and others predicting some epidemical disorder."
"Those who had observed the explosions of Etna 20 days and more before, were inclined to believe it originated from one of them."
"The shower extended from N. N. E. to S. S. W. over the fields, about 70 miles in a right line from the vertex of Etna."
"There is nothing new in volcanoes having thrown up sand, and also stones, by the violent expansive force generated within them, which sand has been carried by the wind to distant regions."
"But the colour and subtlety of the matter occasioned doubts concerning its origin; which increased from the remarkable circumstance of the water in which it came incorporated; for which reasons some other principle or origin was suspected."
"It became, therefore, necessary by all means to ascertain the nature of this matter, in order to be convinced of its origin, and of the effects it might produce. This could not be done without the help of a chemical analysis. To do this then with certainty, I endeavoured to collect this rain from places where it was most probable no heterogeneous matter would be mixed with it. I therefore chose the plant called brassica capitata, which having large and turned-up leaves, they contained enough of this coloured water: many of these I emptied into a vessel, and left the contents to settle till the water became clear."
"This being separated into another vessel, I tried it with vegetable alkaline liquors and mineral acids; but could observe no decomposition by either. I then evaporated the water in order to reunite the substances that might be in solution; and touching it again with the aforesaid liquors, it showed a slight effervescence with the acids. When tried with the syrup of violets, this became a pale green; so that I was persuaded it contained a calcareous salt. With the decoction of galls no precipitation was produced."
"The matter being afterwards dried in the shade, it appeared a very subtle fine earth, of a cretaceous colour, but inert, from having been diluted by the rain."
"I next thought of calcining it with a slow fire, and it assumed the colour of a brick. A portion of this being put into a crucible, I applied to it a stronger heat; by which it lost almost all its acquired colour. Again, I exposed a portion of this for a longer time to a very violent heat (from which a vitrification might be expected); it remained, however, quite soft, and was easily bruised, but returned to its original dusky colour."
"From the most accurate observations of the smoke from the three calcinations, I could not discover either colour or smell that indicated any arsenical or sulphureous mixture."
"Having therefore calcined this matter in three portions, with three different degrees of fire, I presented a good magnet to each: it did not act either on the first or second; a slight attraction was visible in many places on the third: this persuaded me, that this earth contains a martial principle in a metallic form, and not in a vitriolic substance."
"The nature of these substances then being discovered, their volcanic origin appears; for iron, the more it
is exposed to violent calcination, the more it is divided by the loss of its phlogistic principle; which cannot naturally happen but in the great chimney of a volcano. Calcareous salt, being a marine salt combined with a calcareous substance by means of violent heat, cannot be otherwise composed than in a volcano.
"As to their dreaded effects on animals and vegetables, every one knows the advantageous use, in medicine, both of the one and the other, and this in the same form as they are thus prepared in the great laboratory of nature.
"Vegetables, even in flower, do not appear in the least macerated, which has formerly happened from only showers of sand.
"How this volcanic production came to be mixed with water may be conceived in various ways.
"Ætna, about its middle regions, is generally surrounded with clouds that do not always rise above its summit, which is 2900 paces above the level of the sea. This matter being thrown out, and descending upon the clouds below it, may happen to mix and fall in rain with them in the usual way. It may also be conjectured, that the thick smoke which the volcanic matter contained might, by its rarefaction, be carried in the atmosphere by the winds over that tract of country; and then cooling so as to condense and become specifically heavier than the air, might descend in that coloured rain.
"I must, however, leave to philosophers (to whom the knowledge of natural agents belongs) the examination and explanation of such phenomena, confining myself to observation and chemical experiments."