If some of the lightning-clouds tower at a gigantic elevation over the earth’s surface, there are others that lie almost flat on it. There are some remarkable observations on this kind in existence, made by German meteorologists. Two of these deserve particular notice. On August 27, a heavy storm burst over the town of Admont, on the river Ens, in Styria, and the lightning, falling upon the lower part of the great convent of the Benedictines, and passing through the wall, killed two young priests near the altar, while reading vespers. The convent lies, like the town of Admont, in a valley, and above it, some three hundred feet higher, stands a castle, in which resided at the time a German professor, specially interested in the phenomena of thunderstorms. He watched assiduously the coming storm, and saw the lightning fall upon the great convent, noticing all the while that the gilded cross placed on the belfry of the edifice, about 115 feet from the ground, remained standing out clear above the electric cloud, which appeared to come close to the earth’s surface. He noticed further that above this cloud, enveloping the ground portion of the Benedictine convent, there hovered another, more than two thousand feet higher, and at intervals he could see streaks of lightning fly from between the two, not however from the more elevated to the lower one, but in a contrary direction. It was evident that the two clouds must have been charged by electric forces of different ‘degree,’ or ‘potential;’ it may be, one of a ‘negative’ and the other of a ‘positive’ kind, or, as Benjamin Franklin termed them, ‘plus’ and ‘minus;’ although, as long as the forces differ in ‘degree’ or ‘potential,’ it is not essential that they be of opposite kinds. As the marvellously sagacious discoverer of the lightning conductor surmised, the wondrous force is really unitarian--that is, throughout the same, the term ‘kind’ really only indicating on which side of an assumed zero (the potential of the earth) the observations or measurements are made.