A more extraordinary phenomenon still is that people who are struck show no sign of the slightest injury on a minute medical examination. The ancients remarked this, as we see in the charming passage from Plutarch: "Lightning struck them dead without leaving any mark on the bodies nor any wound or burn--their souls fled from their bodies in fright, like a bird which escapes from its cage." We have already spoken of the smell of fulminated air and of ozone. In some cases there is more than that. On June 29, 1895, lightning struck a low house at Moulins in the course of a violent storm. The fluid, eccentric as usual, attacked the outer chimney, the bricks of which were loose and projected slightly. It broke some tiles on the roof, the length of one rafter, and inside the corn-loft it broke the wooden handle of an iron rake to splinters. On the ground floor, bricks were both loosened and torn out near where the pipe of the stove went into the wall of the chimney-piece. A dozen plates were broken in a cupboard to the left of the hearth, and a woman who happened to be near it at the time of the explosion, said she had felt her legs warmed by the burning air which came from the cupboard. The room was afterwards filled with a thick infected smoke, a veritable poison. Sometimes the victims are nearly asphyxiated by the fulminic effluvium, and only owe their preservation to the extreme care which is lavished on them. Very often the bodies and the clothes of people who have been struck give forth a nauseous smell--generally similar to that of burning sulphur. In the month of August, 1879, a woman who had been struck at Montoulieu, in the Champ Descubert quarter, had her skull perforated as though a big ball had passed through it, and her burnt clothes gave forth insupportable emanations. Dr. Minonzio relates how three persons were wounded by lightning on board the Austrian frigate _The Medée_. "I remember," he says, "the sensation which was caused in the locality by the stench which came from the bodies and clothes of these people who were struck--a stench nearly as offensive as that of burnt sulphur mingled with empyreumatical oil." One of the most frequent and good-natured effects of lightning on man is to shave his hair and beard, to scorch them, or even to depilate the whole body. Generally the victim may consider himself lucky if he leaves a handful of hair as a ransom to the lightning, and escapes with a fright. There is even a case given of a young girl of twenty who had her hair cut as though by a razor, without perceiving it or feeling the least shock. On May 7, 1885, two men who were in a windmill were struck by lightning. They were both struck deaf, and the hair and beard and eyebrows of one were burnt. In addition to this, their clothes crumbled to the touch.