d cattle disease, the last two of which
are well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in the
'Tempest' is a surviving proof how thunderstorms, too, can be magically
produced. The tongues of sheep-bells ought to be made of meteoric iron
or of elf-bolts, in order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth
disease or death by storm. Built into walls or placed on the threshold
of stables, thunderbolts are capital preventives of fire or other
damage, though not perhaps in this respect quite equal to a rusty
horseshoe from a prehistoric battlefield. Thrown into a well they purify
the water; and boiled in the drink of diseased sheep they render a cure
positively certain. In Cornwall thunderbolts are a sovereign remedy for
rheumatism; and in the popular pharmacopoeia of Ireland they have
been employed with success for ophthalmia, pleurisy, and many other
painful diseases. If finely powdered and swallowed piecemeal, they
render the person who swallows them invulnerable for the rest of his
lifetime. But they cannot conscientiously be recommended for dyspepsia
and other forms of indigestion.

As if on purpose to confuse our already very vague ideas about
thunderbolts, there is one special kind of lightning which really seems
intentionally to simulate a meteorite, and that is the kind known as
fire-balls or (more scientifically) globular lightning. A fire-ball
generally appears as a sphere of light, sometimes only as big as a Dutch
cheese, sometimes as large as three feet in diameter. It moves along
very slowly and demurely through the air, remaining visible for a whole
minute or two together; and in the end it generally bursts up with great
violence, as if it were a London railway station being experimented upon
by Irish patriots. At Milan one day a fire-ball of this description
walked down one of the streets so slowly that a small crowd walked after
it admiringly, to see where it was going. It made straight for a church
steeple, after the common but sacrilegious fashion of all lightning,
struck the gilded cross on the topmost pinnacle, and then immediately
vanished, like a Virgilian apparition, into thin air.

A few years ago, too, Dr. Tripe was watching a very severe thunderstorm,
when he saw a fire-ball come quietly gliding up to him, apparently
rising from the earth rather than falling towards it. Instead of running
away, like a practical man, the intrepid doctor held his ground quietly
and observed the fiery mo