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THE pages of ancient history are frequently swollen with "accounts of prodigies and marvellous occurrences." attentive examination, "will show," says M. Salverte, a French writer on the occult sciences, reviewed in the "Foreign Quarterly Review," "that a small number of causes which may be discerned and developed, will serve for the explanation of nearly the whole of these.". There are two reasons for our believing accounts of prodigies 1. The number and agreement of these accounts, and the confidence to which the observers and witnesses are entitled. 2. The possibility of dissipating what is wonderful by ascertaining any one of the principal causes which might have given to a natural fact a tinge of the marvellous. Respecting the first, the ancients have recorded various occurrences; a shower of quicksilver at Rome, for example, is mentioned by Dion Cassius, in the year 197 of our era, and a similar event is detailed under the reign of Aurelian; if we attend to phenomena taking place in our own time,t we must consign them to

t At 4 P. M. May 27, 1819, the commune of Griguencourt, in the department of the Vosges, was devastated by a tremendous hailstorm: many of the hailstones, weighing about a pound, were collected, and allowed to melt; in the centre of each was found a stone, of a bright coffee colour, from four to seven-tenths of an inch in thickness, broader than a two-franc piece, flat, round, polished, and pierced in the centre with a hole large enough VOL, VI.

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"the annals in which science has inserted the facts she has recognised as such, without as yet pretending to explain them." As to the second, the deceptive appearance which nature sometimes assumes, the exaggeration, almost unavoidable by partially informed observers, of the details of a phenomenon, or its duration; improper, ill understood, or badly translated expressions, or figurative language, and a poetical style; erronecus explanations of emblematical representations; apologues and allegories adopted as real facts;such are causes which, singly or together, have frequently swollen with prodigious fictions the pages of history, and it is by carefully removing this envelope that eln cidations must be sought of what have hitherto been improperly and disdainfully rejected. A few examples will illustrate these several positions.

The river Adonis being impregnated during certain seasons with volumes of dust raised from the red soil of that part of Mount Libanus near which it flows, gave rise to the fable of the periodical effusion

to admit the little finger. Wherever the hail had fallen, there were found, when it melted, many similar stones, up to that time unknown in the commune of Grignoncourt. On the banks of the Ognon, a river which flows ten or twelve leagues from Grignoncourt, is a considerable number of stones similar to those in question, and also pierced in the middle: can they have been produced by a hailstorm charged with aerolithes.