has himself seen their effect; for the king had made the experiment twice before his eyes." Humboldt says, "The close attention paid by the Tuscans to the meteorological processes of the atmosphere, and to every thing which varied from the ordinary course of nature, makes it certainly a subject of regret that none of the lightning-books have come down to us. The epochs of the appearance of great comets, or the fall of meteoric stones, and the crowds of falling stars, were, without doubt, as clearly laid down in them, as in the more ancient Chinese annals used by Edward Biot." Creuzer, in his Symbols and Mythology of the Ancient Nations, has attempted to show that the peculiarity of the country in Etruria produced the characteristic direction of the mind of its inhabitants. There is a strong analogy between the power over lightning, attributed to Prometheus, and the wonderful pretended attraction of the lightning of the Fulgatores. But there was no science in the operation, which consisted in exorcising only, and possessed nothing more effective or practical than the carved ass's head, by means of which, according to their religious customs, they defended themselves during a thunder-storm. Otfried Mūller states that, according to the complex Etrurian theory of Auguries, the soft, warming lightning, which Jupiter sent down, by his own authority and power, was distinguished from the more violent electrical mode of castigation, which, according to the constitution of the heavens, he only dared send down after a previous consultation with all the twelve gods. Lightning from the higher cloud-region they carefully distinguished from those flashes which Saturn caused to arise from below, and which they called terrestrial lightning, a distinction much more intelligently discriminated by modern science. After an imperfect but continuous mode, complete registers of the daily condition of the weather were established. The Aquileges, those who were specially skilled in drawing forth springs of water and examining its properties, originated a somewhat critical investigation of geological phenomena, such as the strata of rocks and the inequalities of earth-formations. Diodorus extols the Tuscan race as a people addicted to the study of nature. They were undoubtedly, in their day, the most efficient promoters of physical knowledge, and laid the foundation of science for the Augustan age.