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THUNDER, the noise which accompanies or follows a flash of lightning, due to the disturbance of air by a discharge of electricity (see LIGHTNING; ATMOSPHERIC ELECTRICITY and METEOROLOGY). The Old English word is bunor, also the name of the Scandinavian god Tho ...

THUNBERG, KARL PETER (1743-1828), Swedish naturalist, was born at Jonkoping on the nth of November 1743, and became a pupil of Linnaeus at the university of Upsala. After graduating in medicine there in 1770 he obtained an appointment as surgeon in the Dutch E

... nding country for many miles is absolute desert, except after rare but terrible thunderstorms, when the dry bed of the Little Fish river is suddenly filled with a turbulent stream, the water finding its way into the bay. The islands off the coast of Angra Pequ ...

... miniatureearthquake by sending steam through the tubes. Secondly, he simulated thunder and lightning, the latter by flashing in Zeno's eyes an in tolerable light from a slightly hollowed mirror. Certain it is that he wrote a treatise on burning-glasses. A fra ...

... plied to the victims of this disease, of attoniti and siderati, as if they were thunder-stricken or planet-struck " (Sir Thomas Watson). The attack, however, may be less sudden and, not infrequently, attended by a convulsion; while occasionally, in the conditi ...

... e summer and cold in the winter; among the mountains the snowfall is heavy, and thunderstorms are frequent, but there is comparatively little rain. Within a recent geological period, central Aragon was undoubtedly submerged by the sea, and the parched chalky s ...

... five classes: (i) Signs in the sky (caeleslia auspicia), consisting chiefly of thunder and lightning, but not excluding falling stars and other phenomena. Lightning from left to right was favourable, from right to left unfavourable; but on its mere appearance ...

... he spark and crackling sound when warm amber was rubbed, and compared them with thunder and lightning (Phil. Trans., 1708, 26, p. 69). Stephen Gray (1696-1736) noticed in 1720 that electricity could be excited by the friction of hair, silk, wool, paper and oth ...

... ed Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds. The things that each most admired in the other were selfreliance, directness, moral courage. A passage in Emerson's Diary, written on his homeward voyage, strikes th ...

... acrifice; the libri fulgurales, which explained the messages of the gods in the thunder and lightning; and finally the libri rilualrs. which held the rules for the conduct of daily life — how to found cities, where to place the gates, how to take the census, a ...

... Xijua«s, whose position is uncertain. The ppovrflov was a machine for imitating thunder by means of stones rolled in metal jars. It is far from certain whether a drop-scene was used in the classical period of the Greek drama; in later times and in the Roman th ...

... tified with the Roman Jupiter. His name is identical with the Teutonic word for thunder, and even in Sweden the association of Thor with the thunder seems not to have been forgotten. Outside the Teutonic area he has close affinities not only with Jupiter or Ze ...

... , cf. " turn "), a local whirlwind of extreme violence, usually formed within a thunderstorm. In appearance it consists of a funnel-shaped cloud, depending from the mass of storm-cloud above, and when fully developed tapering downwards to the earth. Besides it ...

... ly become cloudy by the expansion of ascent, even to the point of forming local thunder showers which drift away as they grow and soon dissolve after leaving the parent mountain. Conversely, nocturnal cooling produces well-defined descending breezes which issu ...