'The Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society. From December 1854 to March 1856. (New Issue.) Edited by the Secretary. Volume XII.' [‎6] (117/258)

6
BK. G. BUIST
la Europp, hailstorms usually travel rapidly over the country in straight
narrow bands> of vast length, but very small lateral extension. On the
24th July 1818, a hailstorm passed over the Orkneys from S. W. to
N. E., twenty miles in length and a mile and a half in breadth : it travel
led at the rate of a mile in a minute and a half, or the speed of a race-horse ;
ice covered the ground to the depth of nine inches, though the storm at
no given place endured beyond as many minutes. * In 1788, a hail-storm
moved directly from the S. W. of France to the shores of Holland. It
marched along in two columns, the breadth of that on the west being ten
miles, that of the east five miles, with twelve miles between them : the one
extended nearly 500 miles, the other 440 miles ; the destruction occasioned
by it amounted to close on a million sterling, f
Tlie Indian hailstorm falls in very limited patches, and seldom lasts above
fifteen or twenty minutes ; but the frequency with which hailstorms
occur simultaneously at places remote from each other, but nearly in
straight lines, seems to indicate a tendency on the part of the column to
become continuous—probably they are at times more so thau we imagine,
only that such things are not made known to us where there are no Euro
peans, and where the country is thinly inhabited. Tiie most noble of these
are the hailstorms which fell on the 12th and 43th May 1853, at Feroze*
pore, Lahore, and Meean Meer, Peshawur, and Jummoo, places occupying
a line 350 miles in lenghth, rightacross the Punjaub: unluckily the ours
at which they occurred at these places respectively are not given.
Although this is the oidy instance I am aware of, of a series of hailstorms
bursting out simultaneously, and, if not quite forming a continuous line, ap-
pearing somewhat like a string of beads stretched across the country, we
have numbers of them occurring in pairs or in threes on the same day at
places remote from each other. Our first outbursts of hail nearly al
ways happen within a week or two of each other at what may almost be
termed the GLACIAL periods of our climate, and I have no doubt that in
many of these cases it would appear that there had been independent
chains of hail showers, or of local atmospheric changes, many of which were
accompanied by bail, had a greater abundance of records for reference
* Thomson, p. 175.
f Ibid. 24,962,000 francs.