urse the noble savage was himself in the
constant habit of shooting at animals and enemies with a bow and arrow.
When, then, he tried to figure to himself the angry god, seated in the
storm-clouds, who spoke with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed
those who displeased him with his fiery darts, he naturally thought of
him as using in his cloudy home the familiar bow and arrow of this
nether planet. To us nowadays, if we were to begin forming the idea for
ourselves all over again _de novo_, it would be far more natural to
think of the thunder as the noise of a big gun, of the lightning as the
flash of the powder, and of the supposed 'bolt' as a shell or bullet.
There is really a ridiculous resemblance between a thunderstorm and a
discharge of artillery. But the old conception derived from so many
generations of primitive men has held its own against such mere modern
devices as gunpowder and rifle balls; and none of the objects commonly
shown as thunderbolts are ever round: they are distinguished, whatever
their origin, by the common peculiarity that they more or less closely
resemble a dart or arrowhead.

Let us begin, then, by clearly disembarrassing our minds of any
lingering belief in the existence of thunderbolts. There are absolutely
no such things known to science. The two real phenomena that underlie
the fable are simply thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is merely a
series of electrical discharges between one cloud and another, or
between clouds and the earth; and these discharges manifest themselves
to our senses under two forms--to the eye as lightning, to the ear as
thunder. All that passes in each case is a huge spark--a commotion, not
a material object. It is in principle just like the spark from an
electrical machine; but while the most powerful machine of human
construction will only send a spark for three feet, the enormous
electrical apparatus provided for us by nature will send one for four,
five, or even ten miles. Though lightning when it touches the earth
always seems to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is by no
means certain that the real course may not at least occasionally be in
the opposite direction. All we know is that sometimes there is an
instantaneous discharge between one cloud and another, and sometimes an
instantaneous discharge between a cloud and the earth.

But this idea of a mere passage of highly concentrated energy from one
point to another was far too abstract, o