cal formulas in _x_, _y_, _z_, with horrid
symbols interspersed in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of
Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra hurls down upon
the head of the trembling malefactor--how infinitely grander, more
fearsome, and more mysterious!

And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large number of
well-informed people, who have passed the sixth standard, taken prizes
at the Oxford Local, and attended the dullest lectures of the Society
for University Extension, but who nevertheless in some vague and dim
corner of their consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the
existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in its entirety the
simple truth that lightning is the reality of which thunderbolts are the
mythical, or fanciful, or verbal representation. We all of us know now
that lightning is a mere flash of electric light and heat; that it has
no solid existence or core of any sort; in short, that it is dynamical
rather than material, a state or movement rather than a body or thing.
To be sure, local newspapers still talk with much show of learning about
'the electric fluid' which did such remarkable damage last week upon the
slated steeple of Peddlington Torpida Church; but the well-crammed
schoolboy of the present day has long since learned that the electric
fluid is an exploded fallacy, and that the lightning which pulled the
ten slates off the steeple in question was nothing more in its real
nature than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word thunderbolt
has survived to us from the days when people still believed that the
thing which did the damage during a thunderstorm was really and truly a
gigantic white-hot bolt or arrow; and, as there is a natural tendency in
human nature to fit an existence to every word, people even now continue
to imagine that there must be actually something or other somewhere
called a thunderbolt. They don't figure this thing to themselves as
being identical with the lightning; on the contrary, they seem to regard
it as something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and more mystic; but
they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real life, and even
sometimes assert that they themselves have positively seen them.

But, if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who have looked
into the phenomena of spiritualism and 'psychical research' (modern
English for ghost-hunting) know too well, that believing is seeing also.
The