About the year 1899 a new form of hail rod was introduced in France, and this has become the favorite means of protection against hail in that country. It is essentially a very large lightning rod of pure copper, grounded by means of a broad copper conductor. Such rods have been installed, in some cases, on church steeples and other tall edifices, including the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, and in other cases on tall steel towers erected for this purpose. This device is called fantastically an “electric Niagara,” because, according to the claims of its promoters, it draws down “torrents” of electricity from the clouds. Hundreds of these “Niagaras” have been constructed in France. Some of them are set up in rows, or so-called _barrages_, across the habitual paths of hailstorms. The French Government was induced to appoint a “Comité de Défense contre la Grêle” (Hail-protection Committee), which before the war had made elaborate plans for “protecting” not only the whole of France, but also Algeria and Tunis, with these devices. Similar rods have been erected in Argentina, and plans for introducing them in South Africa were near consummation at the time the World War broke out. In order to understand the extraordinary hold that the various hail-protecting devices have taken upon the minds of European cultivators it should be remembered that the intensive cultivation of the soil is the rule over the greater part of Europe, so that a hailstorm of relatively small extent often does enormous damage. Vineyards are especially subject to injury from this cause, and many of the richest vine-growing districts of the Old World are notoriously afflicted with hailstorms.