Note 12 — Chapter XX · PHOSPHORUS.

The frequency of the appearance of lights, or luminous appearances, at séances, is suggestive of the idea that Spirits often employ, in their manifestations, phosphorus in some form or condition—phosphorus probably drawn from the atmosphere, or from the brains of the medium or sitters, or both, through their higher knowledge of the secrets and resources of the chemistry of nature. That they should know also how to make it inodorous is easily conceivable. I have never perceived (though in this the author of “The Missing Link” thinks she has sometimes done so) any of the phosphoric odor as accompanying those exhibitions of Spirit lights, though sometimes the entire forms of Spirits appear as what I may call phosphorically luminous. That human brains are, to some extent at least, natural reservoirs, from which they draw or elaborate some basis of phosphorus, seems probable enough—or at least should be so to those philosophers who strive to approximate phosphorus to thought, and bid us eat phosphoric food to stimulate our wits, and fancy they catch a gleam of it in the brightening of the eye. It is reliably recorded that at the famous séances of Count de Bullet, at which the controlling Spirit is known by the conventional name of “John King,” he constantly appeared holding what seemed a round, white, luminous stone, whose light would gradually fade out after a while, till almost invisible, when he would either withdraw for a moment or two into the cabinet, where the medium was asleep in trance, and return with his lamp re-illumined, or else apply the stone, called his ‘lamp,’ to the forehead of the Count de Bullet, when the light would be seen to rapidly resume its full brightness. The first effect of such application to the forehead, was that dark clouds of wreathing smoke would seem to enter into the stone from the forehead, soon to pass into pervading light; strong in close proximity, but, like phosphoric light, not radiating to much distance. That the Spirits should be able to elaborate the cerebral, or atmospheric, or terrestrial phosphorus into the condition of solid particles of granulated phosphorus, is not difficult to conceive, but I do not know of any other instance of their having actually done it, under human observation, than that now related by Mrs. Underhill.—Ed.