Abstract
IN NATURE of the 15th there is an account of hailstones of a form deviating considerably from the spherical. Hailstones are frozen raindrops, and a rain-drop falling through a vacuum would of necessity be spherical, but in falling through the air it must tend to assume the form of least resistance, whatever that may be. I was told many years ago of hailstones which had been picked up and found to be of the form of Minié bullets. I do not vouch for the truth of this, but I think it likely; the Minié bullet was, I believe, the nearest approach to the form of least resistance that the inventor was able to arrive at.
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MURPHY, J. Hailstones. Nature 3, 167 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/003167c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/003167c0
