The lightning often shows in itself a sort of explosive power. Every one is familiar with the blasting of trees, and the throwing of fragments to a great distance. Some unusually violent effects of this class have been noticed. In 1762, stones weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, were flung from a church in Cornwall, to a distance of one hundred and eighty feet. In the Shetland Isles, during the last century, a rock of mica schist, one hundred and five feet long, ten feet broad, and from three to five feet thick, was in an instant torn by a flash of lightning from its bed, and broken into three large and several smaller fragments. One piece twenty-six feet long, ten feet broad, and four feet thick, was merely inverted. A second, twenty-eight feet long, seventeen feet broad, and five feet thick, was hurled over a high point to a distance of fifty yards: another mass, forty feet long, was hurled still further in the same direction, quite into the sea. Certain localities seem to have peculiar attractive power for lightning. On the Norwegian coast is a narrow channel between two dark rocky headlands, where the lightning seems often to play almost incessantly. The gloomy chasm, so frequently reverberating with the roll of the thunder, is viewed with superstitious fear by ignorant sailors; and the boldest heart is filled with awe in the forbidding presence of the Lyse Fiord. By many he is thought a venturesome captain who will dare take his vessel through this frowning gateway. But after a careful consideration of the topic, it is clear that lightning is less to be feared than almost any other of the atmospheric phenomena. Comparatively rare are the cases where more than one or two persons are killed at once. Statistics hitherto collected show that scarcely one death in two thousand is occasioned by it. And yet no force seems to be so universally feared. Every people in every age have taken precautions against it, while the hurricane and the flood pass almost unheeded. The ancient Thracians were wont to shoot their arrows at the sky during a storm, to remind the fire-gods to be a little more careful in their sport. A similar practice is found among certain South African tribes: while the South Sea Islanders, far more fearless, tell of Ina, a woman whom the moon stole for his wife, while she was beating bark-cloth. She may be seen in the moon to-day--the figure we call the “man in the moon.” Continually at work, she spreads out her cloth on the sky to dry--(clouds)--fastening it down with blue stones, of which the sky is built. When done, she gathers it up, throwing down the stones, which, falling upon the earth, produce the sound of thunder. The lightning is the torch the moon holds to aid her in her work.