It was partly through scientific controversies about the relative conducting value of metals, and partly through the action then taken by several German Governments of providing all buildings with lightning conductors, that the Rosstall case excited an extraordinary interest at the time. The Royal Commission appointed by the King of Bavaria, presided over by an eminent savant, Professor Kastner, went to Rosstall to inspect the effects of the lightning discharge, and Professor von Yelin did the same, as an independent, though not disinterested witness. Their reports as to actual facts were the same. The lightning, after striking the steeple of the church, had melted the top of the ‘_Auffangstange_,’ or highest part of the conductor, and further down had passed along the brass rope till coming to the clock, only a few inches distance from it. Here the electric force had evidently divided itself into several streams--the one exerting its disastrous effects upon the clock and brickwork, and several metallic objects underneath, and the other passing down the rope conductor, but not without bending it, and, in one or two places, tearing it to pieces. Such were the facts, visible to all eyes. But the conclusion drawn therefrom differed widely. The members of the Royal Commission made it public that the reason of the Rosstall lightning conductor not having been efficient had simply arisen from its nature. Brass-wire ropes, they declared, though perhaps useful against small discharges of electricity, formed no reliable safeguards against powerful ones; and they therefore strongly advised a return to the old-fashioned iron rods. The conclusion was vehemently disputed by Professor von Yelin. He admitted that it might be better, to provide for the proper discharge of extraordinary masses of the electric force, to make his brass ropes, when applied to high churches and other large edifices, even thicker than they had been at Rosstall; but at the same time he utterly denied that, even in this case, they had been the origin of the disaster. He showed that the real cause of it was that the conductor had not been laid deep enough into the ground, so as to touch moist earth. The church stood upon sandy soil, on an eminence, and to touch ‘good earth’ the brass rope ought to have been sunk down to a depth of at least fifty feet, whereas it did not reach one-third of that depth. The professor was undoubtedly right, but his antagonists nevertheless prevailed. A public prejudice, which no argument could overcome, set in against brass-wire conductors, and they were pulled down from nearly all buildings on which they had been laid, to be replaced by iron rods. Some time had to elapse before real justice was done to metallic ropes as lightning conductors.