near us there is no telling the spot of danger or of
safety in open ground. A discharge from the front of the cloud may take
a downward angle of forty-five degrees, and, passing over hill and
forest, strike an insignificant knoll or a moist meadow half a mile in
advance of the cloud. For myself, if overtaken in the country by a
thunderstorm, I would seek the nearest and most convenient shelter from
the rain and take my chance with the lightning.

Teams and the persons accompanying them appear to be peculiarly in
danger during a thunderstorm. Caves, and even deep mines, afford no
absolute safety, for the thunderbolt has been known to enter even these.
Tall trees are more dangerous than low ones, but none of them appear
capable of affording protection against this mysterious element. The
people of different countries have regarded various kinds of trees as
exempt from the electric stroke, but inquiry has always shown that every
species has suffered in one locality or another. The beech, from some
cause, has probably escaped more generally than any other tree of
considerable size in northern latitudes. But it is the neighborhood of a
good conductor, not a sheltering non-conductor, that affords safety.
Some scientific men have advised a station of fifteen to forty feet from
a tree, or such a position between several trees, but it has sometimes
happened that such open spaces have received the bolt. In cities and
villages, likewise, open spaces are not found to be places of
safety.[5]

The question whether the small metallic articles usually carried about
the person increase the danger is a matter of some concern. Many persons
on the approach of a thunderstorm customarily relieve themselves of
these things. Hair-pins, clasps and the metallic springs often used in
the dresses of ladies are not, however, so easily got rid of. From the
record of the effects of lightning upon the human body we reach the
conclusion that metal is dangerous about the person only according to
its position. Constantine mentions that during a thunderstorm a lady
raised her arm to close a window, when a flash of lightning entered: her
golden bracelet was entirely dissipated, but without the slightest
injury to the wearer. A similar case is reported in the _Edinburgh New
Philosophical Journal_ for 1844. During a violent thunderstorm a
fishing-boat belonging to Midyell, in the Shetland Islands, was struck
by lightning. The discharge came down the mast (w