Showers of blood, sulphur, manna, frogs, fishes, and what not figure in all the old chronicles, and are still frequently reported. Many occurrences of this kind are recorded in Camille Flammarion’s book “The Atmosphere,” Dr. E. E. Free’s “Movement of Soil Material by the Wind” (U. S. Bureau of Soils, Bulletin 68), and Mr. W. L. McAtee’s article “Showers of Organic Matter” in the “Monthly Weather Review” for May, 1917. The power of the wind to whirl objects aloft is a matter of familiar observation. McAtee tells of seeing a silk hat lifted from its owner’s head and blown over a ten-story building in the city of Washington. The vortex of a tornado or a waterspout furnishes the most favorable skyward route for things that belong on _terra firma_. Objects weighing scores or even hundreds of pounds are lifted by these whirls. Within a mile or so of a tornado a shower of cart wheels or cook stoves would not necessarily constitute a “prodigy.” A chicken coop weighing 75 pounds has been carried four miles and a church spire seventeen miles. Oersted tells of a waterspout at Christiansö, on the Baltic, that emptied the harbor to such an extent that the greater part of the bottom was uncovered, while McAtee says that “waterspouts have been observed to accomplish the comparatively insignificant feat of emptying fish ponds and scattering their occupants.” There is, in fact, no mystery about the way in which terrestrial objects of many sorts get into the air; nor, considering the force of the winds and their occasional strong vertical components, is it strange that such objects sometimes travel a long way from home before they return to earth. There are, however, a great many cases of reported showers in which the objects did not really fall, as supposed. McAtee gives the following account of these spurious showers in the “Monthly Weather Review”: “_Insect larvæ._--The rains of insect larvæ that have been investigated have proved to be merely the appearance in large numbers on the surface of the ground or upon snow of the larvæ of soldier beetles (_Telephorus_), or sometimes caterpillars, which have been driven from their hibernating quarters by the saturation of the soil by heavy rains or melting snow. “_Ants._--Accounts of showers of ants have usually been founded on incursions of large numbers of winged ants, which of course needs no assistance from the elements to follow out their habit of swarming forth periodically in immense numbers. “_Honey; sugar._--Showers of honey and of sugar are popular names for what scientists know are exudations of certain plants, or of plant lice which feed on a great variety of plants and whose product is often known also as honeydew. “_Grains._--Showers of grain, usually considered miraculous, have in most cases been determined to be merely the accumulation by washing during heavy rains of either the seeds or root tubercles of plants of the immediate neighborhood.