Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/160

 130 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. VL AUG. is, 1900. Charleston in South Carolina, but omits to give the year. He says : — " On the 23rd or 24th of October last, when the weather was quite calm, a ahower of dust fell on the decks, tops and sails of the ship, so that the next morning they were covered with it. The ship at this time was between Shetland and Iceland, about twenty- five leagues distant from the former, and which was the nearest land." Count Gioeni gives an account of a grey rain, which, after evaporating and filtrating away, left every place covered with it to the height of two or three lines, and all the iron- work that was touched by it became rusty. This was on 24 April, 1781. The shower extended fron N. i N.E. to S. i iS.W. over the fields, about seventy miles in a straight line from the vertex of Etna. The Philosophical Society's Transactions for 1728 give an account of a shower of pumice-stones which fell in latitude 35° 36' S. and longitude 4° 9' W., with variation 3° 16' W. This was contributed by Mr. John Dove. The nearest land was 186 leagues distant — the islands of Tristan d'Acunha. The same journal for 1698 gives the follow- ing account of a shower of fishes by Robert Conny, who writes : — "On Wednesday before Easter, anno 1666, a pas- ture 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 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 ana showed to several persons. The field belonged to one Ware, a yeoman, who was at that Easter Sessions one of the grand inquest, and carried some of them to the sessions at Maidstone in Kent, and he showed them, among others, to Mr. Lake, a bencher of the Middle Temple, who had one of them and brought one to London. The truth of it was averred by many that saw the fishes lie scattered all over that field. There were none in the other fields adjoining : the quantity of them was estimated to be about a bushel. ME. WALLACE asks that "the statements made might be corroborated and fresh in- stances noted." I have not seen the article he alludes to, but give the above account of the fish shower at Cranstead by way of cor- roboration. My excerpts are from vol. iv. of ' The Gallery of Nature and Art,' 1818, edited by J. M. Good, F.R.S., who, alluding in an editorial to the Cranstead fish shower, says : — " The phenomenon, though surprising, has oc- curred in various countries ; and occasionally in situations far more remote from the coast than the one before us." If I had to include meteoric showers in this reply I might continue it ad inftnitum, and frobably, to many readers, ad nauseam, so will content myself with the foregoing, having plenty more information on the same subject if it is required. CHAS. F. FORSHAW, LL.D. Hanover Square, Bradford. Instances are plentiful. Not a few have been already recorded in these pages ; see 4th S. ix. 137, 185, 267, 327, 489 ; 8tfi S. vi. 104, 189, 395 ; vii. 437 ; viii. 387, 493, 516; ix. 12, 134; xii. 228, 352. In Dean Farrar's 'Early Days of Christianity," ch. xxviii. sec. 3 (1888, p. 451), there is a note on Rev. viii. 7, refer- ring to Livy, xxxix. 46, and Dion Cassius, Ixiii. 26, showing that such portents as rain of blood were often mentioned, and instan- cing a case at Naples in 1869. There is a long note on this subject in W. Derham's' Physico- Theology,'ed. 6, 1723, p. 23. He says: "It would oe endless to reckon up the bloody and other prodigious rains taken notice if by historians." Reference should be made to 'Black Raiu Showers and Pumice-Stone Shoals of 1862-3,' by the Rev. James Rust, 1864. W. C. B. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPORTING RECORD (9th S. v. 495; vi. 72). — John Wheble, a devoted partisan of John Wilkes, published in 1793 the first number of the Sporting Maea- zine; or, Monthly Calendar of the Transacttau of the Turf, the Chase, and every other Diw- sion interesting to the Man of Pleasure aid Enterprise. It proved so popular that one «f its readers suggested in an early number t IKi it should be entitled the Transporting Ma.g<r zine. Judging from the contents of the<e early numbers, the "Man of Pleasure anj Enterprise" was assumed to be catholic ii his tastes. It is true that deerstalking ant salmon-fishing, now reckoned among tin higher field sports, obtain no mention ii these pages, on the other hand, the toe frequent public executions are minutely chronicled, with ghastly particulars of the behaviour of the culprits under the gallows. Then a section of each monthly number was designated ' Matrimonial Sporting,' in which the class of offences known as crim. con. were described in a peculiarly nauseous mix- ture of legal, sporting, and facetious terms. Nevertheless, much interesting and unex- pected information may be found in the Sporting Magazine, which was well illus- trated. Cricket and cock-fighting, gambling and betting, racing, shooting, hunting, and angling (except for salmon) are fully dis- cussed. After Wheble, one Pittman became proprietor of this periodical, and at once raised it to a much higher level. He was