On the 26th of December, 1631, Captain _Badily_, being in the Gulph of Volo, in the Archipelago, riding at anchor, about ten o'clock at night, it began to rain _sand_ and _ashes_; and continued to do so till two o'clock the next morning. The ashes lay about two inches thick on the deck: so that they cast them overboard just as they had done snow the day before. There was no wind stirring, when the ashes fell: and yet this extraordinary shower was not confined merely to the place where _Badily's_ ship was;[G] but, as it appeared afterwards, was extended so widely to other parts, that ships coming from _St. John d'Acre_ to that port, being at the distance of _one hundred leagues_ from thence, were covered with the same sort of ashes. And no possible account could be given of them, except that they might come from Vesuvius. On the 23d of October, 1755, a ship belonging to a merchant of Leith, bound for Charles Town, in Carolina, being betwixt Shetland and Iceland, and about twenty-five leagues distant from the former, and therefore about three hundred miles from the latter, a shower of dust fell in the night upon the decks.[H] In October, 1762, at _Detroit_, in America, was a most surprising darkness, from day-break till four in the afternoon, during which time some rain falling, brought down, with the drops, sulphur and dirt; which rendered white paper black, and when burned fizzed like wet gunpowder:[I] and whence such matter could originally be brought, appeared to be past all conjecture, unless it came so far off as from the volcano in Guadaloupe. Condamine says, the ashes of the volcano of _Sangay_, in South America, sometimes pass over the provinces of Maca, and Quito; and are even carried as far as Guayaquil.[J] And Hooke says,[K] that on occasion of a great explosion from a volcano, in the island of Ternata, in the East Indies, there followed so great a darkness, that the inhabitants could not see each other the next day: and he justly leads us to infer what an immense quantity of ashes must, by this means, have been showered down somewhere on the sea; because at _Mindanao_, an hundred miles off, all the land was covered with ashes a foot thick. And now, I must add; that such kind of _falling of stones from the clouds_, as has been described to have happened in Tuscany, seems to have happened also in very remote ages, of which we are not without sufficient testimony; and such as well deserves to be allowed and considered, on the present occasion; although the knowledge of the facts was, at first, in days of ignorance and gross darkness, soon perverted to the very worst purposes.