An ash was struck by lightning on July 17, 1895, on the road to Clermont. This tree, ten metres high, was broken at a point 3-1/5 metres from the ground, and the crown, still hanging by a shred from the trunk, lay on the embankment. The violence of the explosion threw pieces thirty centimetres wide and 3-1/2 metres in length, into a field from twenty-five to thirty metres off. On July 4, 1884, in Belgium, a willow was reduced to a heap of atoms on the ground. In March, 1818, at Plymouth, a fir more than a hundred feet high and forty feet in circumference, the admiration of the countryside, disappeared, literally shattered into bits. Some fragments were thrown two hundred and fifty metres away. One of the most curious effects of lightning is to divide the interior of the tree into concentric layers, fitting them perfectly one into the other, but at the same time separating them with extraordinary precision. _Arbres roulés_ (thus are the trees called which are victims of this odd phenomenon), as a rule, do not show any injury on the outside. But the body, dissected by the electric fluid, soon succumbs. An oak, twenty-five metres high, having been struck on August 25, 1818, was opened to be examined carefully, and it was stated that the concentric layers were as detached from one another as the tubes of an opera-glass. The fireball sometimes hollows a canal through the centre of the trees from the top to the bottom, the sides of which are burnt black. The following is a curious example:-- In June, 1823, at Moisselles, lightning fell upon a great elm, and striking against an enormous knob, rebounded on to a neighbouring elm half its own height, pierced it through and through, shivering it to tatters; the trunk was burst open to the roots, it looked as if it had been bored through from one end to the other by a red-hot bullet that blackened and charred it. Does it not seem as if the lightning plays with the lives of the trees as with man? It threatens, changes, apparently spares, returns to the charge and finally annihilates. And this sport is accompanied, at times, by inconceivable effects. But records are still more eloquent than reflections: Nature, in her own mute speech, tells us of a thousand marvels. Is not the following phenomenon enough to make lightning more mysterious in its fantastic and varied mode of action? On the 19th of April, lightning struck an oak in the forest of Vibraye (Sarthe), cut this tree, measuring a metre and a half in circumference, at two-thirds of its height, pulverized the lower parts, strewed the shreds over a circuit of fifty metres, and planted the upper part exactly on the spot from which the trunk had been snatched, with all the rapidity of a flash. Moreover, the annual concentric circles were separated by the sudden drying up of the sap so effectually, that, the strips only remained welded together where the knots made too great an obstacle to their separation.