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Shower of Fishes

It is not easy to explain in what manner these particles are detached from the water by the operation of the gills; but there seems no doubt of the fact, nor of the redness of the gills being a consequence of the operation of the air. That redness is exactly similar to the vermilion of the blood in the veins of animals with lungs, a vermilion considerably brighter than that of the arteries.

We shall conclude this chapter with an account of a SHOWER OF FISHES. - In the Philosophical Transactions for 1698, Mr. Robert Conny gives the following account of a phenomenon of this kind.

On Wednesday before Easter, anno 1666, a pasture field at Cranstead, near Wrotham, in Kent, about two acres, which is far from any part of the sea, or branch of it, and a place where there are no fish-ponds, but a scarcity of water, was all overspread with little fishes, conceived to be rained down, there having been at that time a great tempest of thunder and rain: the fishes were about the length of a man's little finger, and judged by all who saw them to be young whitings. Many of them were taken up, and shewed to several persons. The field belonged to one Ware, a yeoman, who was at that Easter sessions one of the grand inquest, and who carried some of the fish to the sessions of Maidstone, in Kent, and shewed them, among others, to Mr. Lake, a bencher of the Middle Temple, who procured one of them, and brought it to London The truth of it was averred by many that saw the fishes lie scattered all over the field. There were none in the other fields adjoining: the quantity of them was estimated to be about a bushel.

It is probable that these fishes were absorbed from the sur face of the water by the electric power of a water-spout; ox brushed off by the violence of a hurricane. The phenomenon, though surprising, has occurred in various countries, and occasionally in situations far more remote from the coast than that before us.