All the injuries of which we have spoken (excoriation, stripping off the bark, furrows), are not necessarily mortal. But there are other more serious wounds from which the tree rarely recovers. We allude to deep fissures and breaks produced by lightning. When the fracture touches only a portion of the topmost part of the tree, the result of the accident is not necessarily fatal. But this is not always so. On May 14, 1865, a poplar was split in two by lightning at Montigny-sur-Loing. One half to the full height continued standing. The other half was chopped up in small fragments and thrown to a distance of a hundred metres. These pieces, which were brought to me by M. Fouché, are so dried up and fibrous that they might be taken for hemp instead of wood. In the majority of these cases the tree is split from top to bottom. On July 5, 1884, in Belgium, a poplar, the biggest of a group of trees of the same species, was struck and split down its full length. In the month of August, 1853, on the side of the road from Ville-d'Avray to Versailles, a poplar of about twenty years old was cleft from the topmost bough to its roots; one half remained in its place, the other fell on the road. A black line, about a millimetre wide, ran down the centre of the tree. Sometimes the tree is divided into several parts by vertical fissures. For example, in 1827, near Vicence, a pear tree, three feet in diameter, was split into four parts, from the top down. How often one has remarked great tree trunks in the forests, decayed and desolate, standing sadly, like poor headless bodies? Very often lightning has been the executioner of these trees. In the month of May, 1867, in the forest of Fontainebleau, a magnificent oak, about two metres in circumference, was completely decapitated by lightning; its branches fell on the ground. The part of the trunk left standing was barked to the roots and splintered into fragments of varying sizes. They were scattered on the ground or hung from the branches of the surrounding trees. Several pieces of considerable size were hurled more than thirty metres away, much to the injury of the bark of the trees which they struck. In numerous cases, the tree struck by lightning is broken in several places, and fragments of it thrown far and wide. On July 2, 1871, at the farm of Etiefs, near Rouvres, canton of Auberive (Haute-Marne), lightning struck an Italian poplar, sixty years old, thirty metres high, and three metres round at a height of one metre from the ground, splintering off enough wood to make a heap sixty-five centimetres round, and fifty centimetres high.