_A propos_ of this case, very similar to those preceding, Arago
recalled the fact that in 1786 Leroy, a member of the Academie des
Sciences, declared that Franklin had several times told him how a man
who was standing at a door during a storm had seen a tree struck by
lightning opposite him, and that a representation of this tree was
found imprinted upon his breast. Arago recalled, too, in this
connection a report made to the old Academy in August 2, 1786, by
Bossuet and Leroy, in which there was question of a man killed by
lightning on May 10, 1585, in the Collegiate School of Riom in
Auvergne; in this case the electric fluid had entered by the heel and
gone out by the head, leaving on the body singular marks, described in
the report. It was thought that the lightning on its way, through
having forced the blood into all the vessels in the skin, must have
made all the ramifications of these vessels sensitive to impressions
from without. Extraordinary though this may appear, they go on to say,
it is not new; Père Beccaria cites a similar case; and Franklin's case
is cited here also as analogous. Besile, the author of the record of
the Riom case, "did not hesitate," he tells us, "to attribute the
effect to an eruption of the blood in the vessels of the skin,
producing a result similar to that of an injection." The statement in
the _Comptes rendus_ is entitled "Strange appearance of Ecchymoses
formed by lightning upon the skin of two persons."
That is just the question. Was there in these pictures nothing but
ecchymoses--infiltrations of the blood into the cellular tissue?
Perhaps that may be so in some cases, but not in all. Photography, the
photo-electric pictures produced in the laboratories of physicists,
Moses's _figures_(?), the Lichtenberg flowers, cathodic rays, Rontgen
rays, radiography-all these things open new horizons for us. And even
if we do not find any explanation satisfactory, we should not be
justified in accepting the first offered to us as being so, if in fact
it be not.
Here are four interesting cases recorded by Poey in his "Rélation
Historique des images photo-electriques de la foudre."
Mme. Morosa, of Lugano, seated near a window during a storm,
experienced a shock from which she is not stated to have suffered any
ill effects; but a flower, which had stood in the route of the
electric current, was found perfectly _drawn_ on her leg, and this
picture lasted the rest of her days.
In August, 1853, a young girl in the United States of America was
standing at a window facing a nut tree at the moment of a dazzling
flash of lightning; a complete picture of the tree was reproduced on
her body.