To Gardeners’ Chronicle   2 July [1863]

A very slight shower, lasting hardly more than a minute, fell here this morning (July 2) about 10 o’clock. My wife gathering some flowers immediately afterwards noticed that the drops of water appeared yellowish, and that the white Roses were all spotted and stained. I did not hear of this circumstance till the evening; I then looked at several Roses and Syringas and found them much stained in spots. Between the petals of the double white Roses there were still drops of the dirty water: and this when put under the microscope showed numerous brown spherical bodies, $\frac{1}{1000}$ of an inch in diameter, and covered with short, conical transparent spines. There were other smaller, smooth, colourless sacs about $\frac{4}{7000}$ of an inch in diameter. I preserved a minute drop of the water beneath thin glass, cementing the edges, and next morning looked rather more carefully at it. I then observed that the water swarmed with elongated, moving atoms, only just visible with a quarter-inch object glass. Whether these inhabited the rain-drops, when they fell, I cannot of course say; but I suspect so, for the petals, now that they are nearly dry, seem stained with absolutely impalpable matter of the colour of rust of iron. This matter has chiefly collected, in the act of drying, on the edges of each spot. The Rev. M. J. Berkeley could tell us what the larger spherical bodies are which fell this day by myriads from the sky, carried up there, I presume, by some distant whirlwind.¹