29. If they are driven by winds against mountains, those mountains being less electrified attract them, and on contact take away their electrical fire (and being cold, the common fire also;) hence the particles close towards the mountains and towards each other. If the air was not much loaded, it only falls in dews on the mountain tops and sides, forms springs, and descends to the vales in rivulets, which united make larger streams and rivers. If much loaded, the electrical fire is at once taken from the whole cloud; and, in leaving it, flashes brightly and cracks loudly; the particles instantly coalescing for want of that fire, and falling in a heavy shower. 30. When a ridge of mountains thus dams the clouds, and draws the electrical fire from the cloud first approaching it; that which next follows, when it comes near the first cloud, now deprived of its fire, flashes into it, and begins to deposite its own water; the first cloud again flashing into the mountains; the third approaching cloud, and all the succeeding ones, acting in the same manner as far back as they extend, which may be over many hundred miles of country. 31. Hence the continual storms of rain, thunder, and lightning on the east-side of the _Andes_, which running north and south, and being vastly high, intercept all the clouds brought against them from the _Atlantic_ ocean by the trade winds, and oblige them to deposite their waters, by which the vast rivers _Amazons_, _La Plata_, and _Oroonoko_ are formed, which return the water into the same sea, after having fertilized a country of very great extent. 32. If a country be plain, having no mountains to intercept the electrified clouds, yet is it not without means to make them deposite their water. For if an electrified cloud coming from the sea, meets in the air a cloud raised from the land, and therefore not electrified; the first will flash its fire into the latter, and thereby both clouds shall be made suddenly to deposite water. 33. The electrified particles of the first cloud close when they lose their fire; the particles of the other cloud close in receiving it: in both, they have thereby an opportunity of coalescing into drops.--The concussion or jerk given to the air, contributes also to shake down the water, not only from those two clouds but from others near them. Hence the sudden fall of rain immediately after flashes of lightning.