In the neighbourhood of the village of Rumigny, in Picardy, on August 20, 1769, at six o'clock in the morning, there was a sudden irruption of fulminating matter from the bosom of the earth in such quantities as to produce the most violent results. The sky was cloudy, and looked like a storm. A young farmer and his wife were following, at some distance, a vehicle drawn by four horses. Suddenly the driver of this, _without seeing the lightning or hearing the thunder_, was thrown to the earth. His four horses were stretched dead on the ground near the carriage. There was a _smoking hole_ in the ground, from which the effluvium came forth and killed the young man and his wife at ten paces off and separated from each other by twenty paces. The current also knocked down, at a hundred paces, the father of the young man in the same fashion as it had done the driver, but without injuring one or the other. The bodies showed no signs of a wound, only a considerable swelling and a great deformity of the features. The woman, who was young and pretty, became hideous; the whole of her body as well as that of her husband was absolutely yellow. The four horses had their intestines drawn from their bodies. They were all thrown on the same side. The man's hat was pierced and his hair burnt, but he had no bruise on his head. This account, in which we must not be surprised to find the ideas and language of the time (let us observe in passing that the man who was struck did not hear the thunder, and had not even time to see the lightning of which he was the victim)--this account, I say, gives us an instance of ascending lightning. Here is another. The traveller Brydone gives the following example, which he himself observed:--