The malady reached its climax in about twenty-four hours. It was first suspected that the water supply had been somehow poisoned, but many people who had not used the water were prostrated, while others who used it freely escaped. Adams has hitherto been regarded as an exceptionally healthy town, and the surrounding country is high and wholesome. * * * * * CANNONADING OF OIL TANKS. On the morning of Friday, June 11, lightning struck an oil tank belonging to the Tidioute and Titusville Pipe Line, at Titusville, Pa. The fire thus kindled, raged until Sunday night, consuming 200,000 barrels of oil, crude and refined, and destroying property to the amount of $1,500,000. The most appalling feature in this fire was the successive "boiling over" of oil from burning tanks of the liquid. To empty rapidly a tank containing 20,000 barrels of oil, while the latter is on fire, is no easy matter. The pipes connected with the tanks were utterly inadequate to remove the oil rapidly enough to rob the "boiling over" of its terrors. A happy thought suggested itself on Friday to Mr. D. R. Herron, of the Titusville Battery. Obtaining permission, Mr. Herron brought out one of the Parrott guns of the battery, loaded it with solid shot, and began firing against the three-eighths iron sheets of the distant blazing tank. The first shot glanced, but subsequent volleys pierced the shell of the tank, releasing a large quantity of oil that otherwise would have fed the flames. The battery then moved on to the Emery tank, also burning, and lastly to the Acme tank. Large rents were made in all these, and the liberated oil ran harmlessly down into a stream. This novel target practice greatly shortened the duration of the fire at these tanks, and so drained them that the flames died out for want of fuel, and no "boiling over" resulted. The peculiar attraction for lightning which these iron oil tanks appear to possess has been several times referred to in our columns. Whenever a thunderstorm passes fairly over one of them it seems to be devoted to destruction. Millions of dollars' worth of property have thus been destroyed. No practical safeguard has yet been suggested. Ordinary buildings, when properly provided with rods that are well grounded in the earth, are comparatively safe from lightning. Structures made of iron and simply resting upon the earth, without rods, are also exempt from electrical damage. Such structures always present a continuous body of conducting material for the free passage of electricity to earth. Why is it, then, that iron oil tanks form such conspicuous exceptions to our common experience with lightning? Rods put on other structures save them; but rods have been put on oil tanks, masts with rods have surrounded the tanks, but the tanks were exploded by lightning all the same.