MYSTERIOUS RAINS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19787, 10 March 1927, Page 9

MYSTERIOUS RAINS

NATURE’S CURIOUS FREAKS WHAT SHOWERS BRING DOWN Water is by no means the only thing that comes down from the lowering skies in rain, much to the alarm of simple peasant communities who are not slow to read ominous signs and portents into so strange a downfall. In many parts of the world (writes a traveller in the London “Daily Despatch”) I have come across tidings of such showers, and it has been interesting to compare eye-witnesses’ accounts and to square them with scientific truth. Undoubtedly waterspouts and whirling giant eddies of wind such as “dust devils” and tornadoes do suck up salt or fresh water, with whatever happens to be in it, raise it to a great height, carry it for long distances, and eventually drop it—to the no small alarm of wayfarers, who find little fishes and frogs bouncing off their umbrellas!

Not always little fishes either. Even two-pounders came flopping down in the streets of Santa Isabel, in Mexico. The terrific storms that bring the breaking of the monsoons in Assam often bring showers of frogs and fishes. American meteorologists recorded no fewer than seven frog showers in the United States i n 1901, and during May of that year, the treasurer of the American Bible Society was caught in a shower of tadpoles while walking along Fourth Avenue in New York City. “Cats and Dogs.’» About the time of Queen Elizabeth a shower of live rats came down in a storm in Norway, and there is an old print vividly depicting the horror of a passer-by at such goings-on. Doubtless it was some shower, or showers, of that kind that coined our expression, “raining cats and dogs.” I have seen, in Ohio, the black “suction pump” of a racing tornado pulling off roofs, lifting and carrying along sacks and emptying a pond as it passed; most assuredly it could have picked up any hapless cats or dogs in its path, and dropped them On to people some distance away. In 1857, Montreal had a lizard shower and in 1838 a shower of little frogs fell on Great Tower Street, London. In 1880, Argyll, in Scotland, and Feridpore, in India, had fish showers. It | rained little turtles, about 2in. across, 1 on Iron Hill, Maryland, in 1900, and Bath once experienced a rain of small jelly-fish. Any of the older residents of the city of Providence, Rhode Island, will describe to you how on May 15, 1900, little fishes came raining down for a distance of more than a mile, and were exhibited in many a shop window. Showers of Blood. Showers of “sulphur,” however, are merely pollen, usually from flowering pine trees; the peasants reported one last spring, near Bataille, Department Lot. Showers of “blood” are usually rain tinged with red mud or sand, but in May, 1890, real blood did come spattering down at Missignadi, in Southern Italy; probably it emanated from smashed bodies of birds, caught up by a cyclonic eddy of wind and flung against cliffs or trees in the course of their passage.