On June 15, 1794, lightning killed a lady in a ballroom at Fribourg. The corpse rapidly gave forth a curious odour of putrefaction. The doctor could hardly examine it without fainting. The inhabitants of the house were obliged to go away thirty-six hours after the death, the odour was so penetrating. It was with difficulty that they were able to put the fetid corpse into a coffin. It fell to pieces. The flabbiness often observed in the bodies of people who are struck is due, no doubt, to the fact that in the case of enormous discharge, the stiffness of a dead body develops so quickly, and is of such a short duration, that it may escape observation. Numbers of experiments made on animals justify this hypothesis. Nevertheless, in the majority of cases, bodies which have been struck decompose rapidly, which explains quite naturally the softness of bodies killed by lightning. The colouration of these presents numerous varieties; sometimes the face is of a corpse-like paleness, at others it preserves its natural colour. In many cases, the face is livid, red, violet, violet-bronze, black, yellow, and even covered over with brown or blue spots. The colouration of the face may be extended over all or nearly all the body. The eight reapers who were killed under an oak, quoted by Cardan in our first example, were quite black. That the subtle fluid accumulated in great masses in the clouds should kill a man, deprive him of movement, annihilate his faculties, or slightly wound him--this ought not to astonish us when we contemplate the marvellous results and the prodigies of strength accomplished by the much more feeble electricity of our laboratories. But the extraordinary point about lightning is its variety of action. Why does it not invariably kill those it strikes? and why does it sometimes not even wound them? There are inexplicable subtleties in the world. One knows of many examples of people who are struck whose garments remain absolutely intact. The imponderable fluid insinuates itself through the garments, leaving no trace of its passage, and may cause grave disorders in the body of a man without any exterior mark to reveal it to the most perspicacious observer. We hear of the case of a man who had nearly the whole of his right side burnt from the arm to the foot, as though it had been for a long time too near a quick fire, but his shirt, his pants, and the rest of his clothes were untouched by the fire. The Abbé Pinel gives the case of a man who, amongst other injuries, had his right foot very badly lacerated, while the left was untouched; the right sabot was untouched, and the left was broken. On June 10, 1895, at Bellenghise, near Saint-Quentin, a lady was killed under a tree: she had deep marks of burning on the breast and stomach, but her clothes remained intact. Lightning is very mystifying. Th. Neale cites a case where the hands were burnt to the bone in gloves which remained intact!