The earth and all the planets which are dark in themselves, shine in space lighted up by the sun. The silent lightning which flashes in the sky is only the reflection of a distant storm. Whether on account of the spherical shape of the earth or on account of the irregularities of the land, the clouds are invisible, but the effluvium which escapes from them can be seen at a great distance. These poetic and ephemeral flames which glide through the sky, appeal to the imagination of the dreamer, and yet they are quite as terrible as the flashes which are accompanied by thunder. If the noise which accompanies these is not perceptible, it is because the sound of the thunder does not carry far, and has been lost in space before reaching us. It is the same with the silent lightning which gleams in a stormy sky. This phenomenon is particularly frequent in the Antilles. Either the storm breaks too far from the observer, or the discharge has taken place between two beds of clouds, the lower of which intercepts the waves of sound without preventing the escape of the electric spark, and the thunder is not heard. As a rule we imagine that lightning always descends, that it comes to us from the higher celestial regions to be lost in the common reservoir. But this is quite inaccurate. Lightning sometimes ascends. Sometimes it descends and reascends. That is to say, after it reaches the ground, either there is no attraction there, or a stronger force draws it back to the aerial regions, and it flies back to the clouds whence it came. As a rule we only fear the direct lightning. This is a great mistake. There are many cases of lightning striking from a distance. For example, at the end of May, 1866, an English coastguard was making his rounds on the coast of one of the Shetland Isles, when a flash of lightning passed near him, striking a great rock. The unfortunate man was completely blinded, and plunged into darkness thus suddenly, he would inevitably have fallen down an abyss, if his companions, attracted by his cries, had not come to the rescue and taken him home. Here is another case:-- On September 24, 1826, a terrible storm burst over Versailles, accompanied by a great deal of thunder and lightning. At the moment when the lightning struck Galli's farm, an old man who was in a street in Versailles, at a distance of two kilometres from the farm, suddenly felt a violent shock, accompanied by a feeling of oppression and giddiness and a semi-paralysis of the tongue and the whole of his left side. Next morning this had passed away, but in the evening at the same time as the shock had occurred, he felt similar sensations of fainting, and it was the same to the end of the week. It would be well to remark here that at the moment of the accident, M. B---- happened to be near the wall of a house, not far from the metallic tube which conducted the rain-water into the level of the pavement.