which had the luminous cloud on its topmost
mountain, has also globular lightnings—round
balls of fire and light—wandering swiftly over
its waters, to the terror of its boatmen. The
fire of Saint Elmo, which Lord Napier saw,
and which is common in the Levant—that
bright harmless flame which envelopes
mast-head and rigging in a pale greenish light—is of
the same phosphoric class; so are the zodiacal
lights of the tropics and the Aurora Borealis
of the North Pole. Admiral Wrangel noticed
that, during an Aurora Borealis, certain portions
of the heavens, previously dark, were lighted
up when a shooting-star passed, as if the whole
atmosphere wanted but a match anywhere to
set it all aflame with harmless fire. The part of
Venus not lighted by the sun, often shines with
a phosphorescent light of its own; so does the
moon, called by the French, lumière cendrée;
and yet it is worthy of remark that the Bologna
stone, which gets phosphoric light from the
sun and from lighted candles too, gets none
from the moon. The elf-candles of Scotland,
and the corpse-candles of Wales, are known now
to be mere phosphoric lights flitting about the
earth; though indeed some wills-o'-the-wisp
have been found to be nothing worse than
luminous gnats and daddy-longlegs with more
light than science; like that ignis-fatuus of Dr.
Derham's in 1729, which he saw playing about
a thistle, and which was only a luminous insect.

Many flowers are phosphoric. The young
daughter of Linnæus was fond of setting fire to
the inflammable atmosphere round the essential
oil glands of certain fraxinellæ, and making a
fine blaze on dark, warm, sultry summer nights.
Pursuing her play she stumbled on a truth, and
by some chance was led to observe the
phosphorescence of certain flowers; the great nasturtium
being her especial point of observation.
Since her time it has been found that most
yellow or orange-coloured flowers are
phosphorescent, if watched in the twilight during
July and August when the atmosphere is highly
electric, and not a particle of moisture is in the
air. Among the most luminous are the
sunflower (helianthus); garden marygold (calendula);
African marygold (tagetes); the tuberose;
and the orange lily (Lilium bulbiferum):
the brightest colours giving the highest radiance.
This phosphorescence is not caused by luminous
insects, as was proved by M. Haggern's
microscopic examinations; but at one time they were
thought to be organic and not conditional.
Other flowers beside those enumerated, are
found to be phosphorescent. On the 18th of
June, 1857, Fries, the Swedish naturalist, was
walking in the Botanical Gardens at Upsal,
when he saw a group of poppies (Papaver
orientale)—two or three out of the group—emit
flashes of light. Many others observed the same
thing, and the next day more than a hundred
persons assembled there to watch the flowers
"give out flames." So with the leaves of the
American Ænothera macrocarpa, or evening
primrose; so with the milky juice of certain
plants, especially of the Euphorbia phosphorea,
which, if broken in the dark and rubbed on paper,
traces characters of flame of vast significance
and miraculous import in the ages when the
priests alone knew the secrets of nature. So,
one of the family of the pandanus or screw
pine, the spathe of which enveloping the flowers,
bursts with a loud noise, and sends out sparks
as it bursts. The common potato, when
decomposing, gives light enough to read by; a light
so vivid, that, once, a cellar at Strasburg was
thought to be on fire when shining with the
phosphorescence of decomposing potatoes.

A small moss, called the Schistostega
osmundacea—like the royal fern, Osmunda regalis, in
miniature—shines brilliantly in the dark; and the
Rhizomorphæ, humble little cryptogams which
spread their thin dark roots abroad in cellars
and caves and mines and on dank walls, have
such a bright phosphoric light that they have
been spoken of enthusiastically as the
"vegetable glow-worms." In the caverns and granitic
underways of Bohemia, the Rhizomorphæ often
give light enough to read by; so they are said
to do in the English coal mines; but nowhere
are they so brilliant or beautiful as in the mines
of Hesse, in the north of Germany, where they
shine like bright moonlight through the galleries.
A very beautiful fungus, the fire mushroom, or
Fungus igneus, glows with a steady light when
decomposing. This phosphorescence of some of
the agaric tribe was first seen at Amboine, but
afterwards in the Brazils, in an agaric which
grows on the dead leaves of the Pindoba palm—
the Agaricus Gardneri, so named from its discoverer.
Also in a magnificent species to be found
in the Swan River colony. Another mushroom,
growing at the foot of the olive-tree in Italy,
Agaricus olearius, gives a blue light at night;
and the parasitic Byssoid fungi, which penetrate
the tissues of superior fungi and of decayed wood,
send their delicate filaments through and through
the rotting fibres, especially of the willow, and
make the whole mass alight with phosphoric
glory. It is only the filaments of the mycelium,
though, which are phosphoric; the perfect
plant, of a fine blue colour, and known as the
Thelephora cœrulea, is nothing more than blue
and beautiful: it is not a light-bearer.

The sea, too, contributes to the light-bearers
liberally. Macartney's Medusa pellucens and
M. lucida—umbrella-shaped long-haired things—
are of the class; and the Cancer fulgens, a queer
beast, like a shrimp or big sea-flea, found by Sir
Joseph Banks, on the way from Madeira to Rio
Janeiro, is another of the multitudinous
phosphoric personages of the deep; for, indeed, their
name is legion. Among the most curious is the
Pyrosoma Atlantica, like a little cylinder of
phosphorus; a small beast, which, when magnified,
is seen to be tipped with spirals of flame:
and the Noctiluca miliaris, to whose effulgence
is due the phosphorescence of the English
Channel, is another very strangely-shaped
animal. Under a pocket lens, mere little round
points of light—to the naked eye, an
indistinguishable effect of light—when highly magnified
they are found to be leaf, or, perhaps better,