At the Castle of Clermont, in Beauvaisis, there was a formidable old wall, built in the time of the Romans, so tradition has it, which was ten feet thick, and the cement was as hard as stone, so that it was almost impossible to break it. "One day," says Nollet, "a flash of lightning struck it, and instantly a hole, two feet deep and equally wide, was made in it, the _débris_ being thrown more than fifty feet away." On June 17, 1883, at Louvemont (Haute-Marne), the wall of a bakehouse, fifty-five centimetres wide, was broken in by lightning. The church at Lugdivan was struck by lightning in 1761. Two furrows like those made by a plough were to be seen on the wall. One of the most dreadful acts of which lightning is capable is that of hurling considerable masses of stone and rock, broken or intact, to great distances. We have numerous examples of this terrible phenomenon. Here are a few:-- On August 23, 1853, thunder burst over the belfry of Maison-Ponthieu. The explosion scattered the slates and beams of the roof, and shot a stone, measuring thirty-five centimetres, to a distance of twenty metres. Rough stones, weighing more than forty pounds, were torn up and thrown almost horizontally as far as an opposite wall thirty feet away. At Fuzie-en-Fetlar, in Scotland, towards the end of the eighteenth century, lightning broke, in about two seconds at most, a mica-schist rock of one hundred and fifty feet long, by ten broad, and in some parts four feet thick; this it split into great pieces. One, measuring twenty-six feet long by ten broad, and four in thickness, fell on the ground twenty centimetres off. Enormous stones are thrown, at times, in different directions. In 1762 lightning struck the belfry of Breag Church in Cornwall, broke the stone pinnacle of the edifice, and threw one of the stones, weighing at least a hundred-weight and a half, on the roof of the apsis, in a southerly direction, fifty-five metres away. In a northerly direction another huge stone was found at 365 metres or so from the belfry; and a third, still larger, to the south-east of the church. In certain cases the lightning unites a fantastic skill with this excessive brutality. For instance, a wall has been removed intact without being broken in any part. Here is a record of one such extraordinary occurrence:-- On August 6, 1809, at Swinton, near Manchester, during a deluge of rain, the lightning all at once filled a brick building, in which coal was stored, full of pestilential, sulphureous vapour. Above it was a cistern half full. Suddenly the edifice, the walls of which measured thirty centimetres in thickness, were torn out of the ground, the foundations being sixty centimetres deep, and was transported in an upright position to a distance of ten metres. The weight of this mass, so oddly and so rapidly moved by lightning, was estimated at ten thousand kilograms.