Part 10 (2/2)

For instance, a person who had been paralyzed thirty-eight years, suddenly, at the age of forty-four, recovered the use of her legs, after a stroke of lightning.

A paralytic had been taking the curative waters of Tunbridge Wells for twenty years, when the spark touched him and cured him of his terrible infirmity.

Lightning has sometimes worked marvels on the blind, deaf, and dumb, to whom it restores sight, hearing, and speech.

A man who had the whole of his left side paralyzed from infancy was struck in his room on August 10, 1807. He lost consciousness for twenty minutes, but after some days he gradually and permanently recovered the use of his limbs. A weakness of the right eye also disappeared, and the invalid could write without spectacles. On the other hand, he became deaf.

Indeed, if we are to believe stories which appear to be authentic, a cold, a tumour, and rheumatism have been cured by lightning. We have given an example in our first chapter.

It is impossible to explain in what manner the subtle fluid accomplishes these wonderful cures. Are they to be attributed to the shock, to a general upheaval which brings back the circulation to its normal course? Or are we to attribute to the electric substance--still unknown to physicians and physiologists--an action capable of overcoming the most inveterate evils?

The science of Therapeutics already makes excellent use of the electricity of the machines. Can we, then, marvel much that lightning should rival our feeble electric resources? No! What a number of services might it not render if it were not for its mad independence!

What an amount of lost power there is in the gleam of lightning!

As a matter of fact, we owe no grat.i.tude to lightning. There are too many miseries for a few happy results. The balance is really too unequal.

Some lightning strokes have proved veritable disasters, on account of the number of the victims and the havoc which has been caused.

The most extraordinary of these are the following:--

On a feast-day lightning penetrated into a church near Carpentras.

Fifty people were killed or wounded or rendered imbecile.

On July 2, 1717, lightning struck a church at Seidenburg, near Zittau, during the service; forty-eight people were killed or wounded.

On June 26, 1783, lightning struck the church of Villars-le-Terroy, when its bells were being rung; it killed eleven people, and wounded thirteen.

On board the sloop _Sapho_, in February, 1820, six men were killed by a stroke of lightning and fourteen seriously wounded.

On board the s.h.i.+p _Repulse_, near the sh.o.r.es of Catalonia, on April 13, 1813, lightning killed eight men in the rigging and wounded nine, of whom several succ.u.mbed.

On July 11, 1857, three hundred people were a.s.sembled in the church at Grosshad, a small village, two miles from Duren, when lightning struck it; one hundred people were wounded, thirty of them seriously. Six were killed, and they were six hardy men.

Early in July, 1865, lightning fell on the territory of Coray (Finisterre) in a warren where sixteen people were weeding. Six men and a child were killed by the same stroke, and three others were severely wounded. Several were stripped naked, their garments being scattered in rags over the ground; their shoes were cut to pieces and all broken. A curious point is that the workers were struck at a distance of 100 yards from each other.

On July 12, 1887, at Mount Pleasant (Tennessee, U.S.A.), lightning killed nine people who were taking refuge under an oak during a storm.

These formed part of a procession which was conducting a negress to her last home.

Here is another very curious and complex case--

On the last Sunday in June, 1867, during Vespers, lightning struck a church at Dance, Canton of Saint-Germain-Laval (Loire). A deathlike silence succeeded the noise of the explosion, then a cry was heard, then a hundred more. The cure, who thought that he alone had received the whole electric discharge--and was in reality unhurt--left his place, where he was enveloped in a cloud of dust and smoke, and spoke to his paris.h.i.+oners from the Communion rails, to rea.s.sure them. ”It is nothing,” he said. ”Keep your places; there is no harm done.”

He was mistaken; twenty-five to thirty people had been more or less struck. Four were carried away unconscious, but the worst treated of all was the treasurer. In raising him they perceived that his eyes were open, but dull and veiled, and he gave no sign of life. His clothes were burnt, and his shoes, which were torn and full of blood, were removed from his feet.

The Monstrance, which had been exposed, had been thrown down on the ground, and was battered and pierced in the stem, and the Host had disappeared. The priest searched for it for a long time, and finally discovered it on the altar in the middle of the corporal, on a thick bed of rubbish.

Three or four yards of the wainscoting of the choir had burnt into atoms. Outside, the arrow of the belfry had been carried off, and its slates were scattered about in the neighbouring fields.

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