CURIOUS PHENOMENA.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2058, 12 June 1890, Page 4

CURIOUS PHENOMENA.

_At Rome, m 1222, it rained dust, mixed with blood, - three days, and when the heavy clouds drifted away it looked as if the sun was swimming in a sea of fife. Pour years later, in 1226, a snow fell in Syria, which presently melted and flowed in carmine rivers of blood, or some fluid much resembling it in every particular. Many of the old writers record a three days shower of blood-red rain in the Island of Rhodes and throughout Southern Italy in 1235 A monk, writing in 1251, tails of a loaf being cut out of which blood flowed as freely as from a fresh wound.

In 1348 there were many great tempests. Several towns and thousands of people’ were swallowed up and the courses of rivers changed or stopped. Some chasms in the earth sent forth poisonous fluids, as red as carmine ink, as at Villach, in Austria,. Ponderous hailstones fell in many parts of Q-er-many the same year, some of them weighing from twenty to seventy pounds. At Lamech it rained flesh, dust, comets and meteors ; firebrands and coruscations were in the air, mock suns with fiery tails, sailed through the skies. Soon after these terrible scenes at Lamech it began at Cataya, near the sea, and went sweeping throughout southern Europe. An igneous vapor or sulphurous fire broke from the earth at Caahery, Asia, and utterly consumed men, beasts, houses and trees, so infecting the air that a great plague followed. Young serpents and millions of venemous insects fell from the clouds.

In 1361 Burgundy experienced the novelty of a shower of blood-red rain, which ensanguined every thing it touched; and in 1568 the Antiura reapers found all wheat heads to be as red as blood. In 1588 bread put in the oven at Nuremburg was taken out covered with a bloody sweat. Wurtemburg had a shower of brimstone and ashes in 1634. In 1695 Limerick and Tipperary, Ireland, had many showers of a soft, fatty substance resembling butter. It was of a dark yellow colour and always fell at night. The people gathered it and used it as an ointment, reporting Eiany astonishing cures.—St. Louis Republic,