ON April 17, at 4 o'clock p.m. (local time), a very remarkable hailstorm visited the neighbourhood of a small hamlet, called El Totumo,1 not far from the town of Tinaco, section Cojedes, State of Zamora, Venezuela. The place is approximately in 9° 25′ N. lat., and 68° 5′ long. W. of Greenwich, certainly not more than 200 metres above sea-level. My informant is a resident of El Totumo, named Nicolas Moreno Nunez, who is universally said to be a trustworthy and respectable man. There was first a very heavy thunderstorm with much rain; but after some time hailstones began to fall in such abundance that it might have been easy to collect them by hundreds of bushels, some weighing as much as two ounces. It is well known that between the tropics hailstorms are exceedingly rare in localities situated in the lowlands; but the present case is still more interesting, on account of the colour of the hailstones, some of which were whitish, whilst others were blue or rose-coloured. I have read of but one instance in which the two last-mentioned colours were observed, viz. in the hailstorm of Minsk of June 14, 1880, described by Lagunowitcb, and quoted by Th. Schwedoff in his memoir “On the Origin of Hailstorms.”2 Schwedoff thinks that the blue and rosy colours are owing to the presence of salts of cobalt and nickel, and thus confirm his hypothesis of the cosmic origin of ha 1. I do not know whether the existence of those mineral constituents in the hailstones of Minsk was ever made certain by chemical analysis, and it is of course impossible for me to do so in the present case, when almost a month has passed since the phenomenon took place. But it is undoubtedly a very curious coincidence that the same colours should have been observed in both instances and in localities so widely separated from each other; whilst there is not the slightest possibility that my informant, an honest and plain countryman of no literary education whatever, should have had any knowledge of such an observation having been made before.