Hydrologic Cycle

Rain is well known that rain falls copiously in thunder-storms. The flash is first seen, the clap is next heard, and last the rain descends. The lightning travels all lengths in no perceivable succession of time. Sound is propagated at the rate of 1142 feet in a second. Rain travels still more slowly, and will be seen sooner or later according to the weight of the drops, and the distance of the cloud from the place of the spectator.
Now the flash, the clap, and the rain, take place all in the same moment, but are discernible by us in the succession already mentioned, and for the reasons given above.
Lighting is represented as coming immediately from the hand of G-d.
Thunder, the clap is the effect of the lightning, which causes a vacuum in that part of the atmosphere through which it passes; the air rushing in to restore the equilibrium may cause much of the noise that is heard in the clap.
How does the thunder cause rain? By the most accurate and incontestable experiments it is proved that water is a composition of two elastic airs or gases as they are called, oxygen and hydrogen. In 100 parts of water there are 88 1/4 of oxygen, and 11 3/4 of hydrogen. Pass a succession of electric sparks through water by means of a proper apparatus, and the two gases are produced in the proportions mentioned above. The rain descending after the flash and the peal and the electric spark or matter of lightning, passing through the atmosphere, ignites and decomposes the oxygen and hydrogen, which explode, and the water which was formed of these two falls down in the form of rain. The explosion of the gases, as well as the rushing in of the circumambient air to restore the equilibrium, will account for the clap and peal: as the decomposition and ignition of them will account for the water or rain which is the attendant of a thunder storm. Thus by the lightning of thunder G-d causes it to rain on the earth. How marvelous and instructive are his ways!
Dew is a dense moist vapour, found on the earth in spring and summer mornings, in the form of a muzzling rain and appears to differ from rain as less from more. Its origin and matters are doubtless from the vapors and exhalations that rise from the earth and water.
Ice is a solid, transparent, and brittle body, formed of water by means of cold. Some philosophers suppose that ice is only the re-establishment of water in its natural state; that the mere absence of fire is sufficient to account for this re-establishment; and that the fluidity of water is a real fusion, like that of metals exposed to the action of fire; and differing only in this, that a greater portion of fire is necessary to one than the other. Ice, therefore, is supposed to be the natural state of water; so that in its natural state water is solid, and becomes fluid only by the action of fire, as solid metallic bodies are brought into a state of fusion by the same means. Ice is lighter than water, its specific gravity being to that of water as eight to nine. This rarefaction of ice is supposed to be owing to the air-bubbles produced in water by freezing, and which, being considerably larger in proportion to the water frozen, render the body so much specifically lighter; hence ice always floats on water. The air-bubbles, during their production, acquire a great expansive power, so as to burst the containing vessels, be they ever so strong.
Hoar-frost is the coagulation of dew, in frosty mornings, on the grass. It consists of an assemblage of little crystals of ice, which are of various figures, according to the different disposition of the vapors when met and condensed by the cold. Is it enough to say that hoar-frost is water deposited from the atmosphere at a low temperature, so as to produce coagulation?
25-28 After the great flood, the whole world was a wilderness, and there were no men to irrigate or till the ground. In the pre-flood world, there had been no rain (Gen. 2:5), but the ground had been watered by a daily mist, or dew, and by a system of rivers fed by artesian springs emerging from the great deep, a vast system of underground pressurized reservoirs. The prehistoric water above the firmament and the great deep had been dissipated at the flood, so G-d had to devise a new system for watering the earth. This he accomplished by activating the marvelous engine which we know today as the hydrologic cycle. See Gen. 7:11.
In directing the course of the rain He does not neglect the wilderness, the desert land, where no man is. Since rain fails also on places uninhabited by man, it cannot be that man guides its course. Such rain, though man cannot explain the reason for it, is not lost. G-d has some wise design in it.