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This being so, it has always appeared to me perfectly reasonable to suppose that the energy of the light-rays should interfere most seriously with the delicate and subtle forces and forms of energy which are liberated in the séance room. The old objection: "Why must these things always be done in the dark?" has appeared to me very short-sighted and inconsistent with all the facts above mentioned.

These substances, that is, in undergoing a kind of chemical disintegration under the action of light-rays, are supposed to give the sensations white, red, or yellow respectively, and in renewing themselves again to give the sensations of black, green, and blue. The dissimilating process seems to bring about stronger reactions on the physiological side, as if it were a more exciting process.

Mackay discovered that by applying to the sides of a ship paint representing the three light-rays shut out by the vessel's hull red, green, and violet the hull is less visible than a similar body painted In solid color.

Eyes, ears, and nose all began on the surface, and sank gradually into the head, so as to be surrounded and protected, leaving just opening enough at the surface to allow smells, light-rays, and sound-waves to enter; and all of them have at their bottom, or deepest part, a sensitive patch of surface, which catches the light, or the smells, or the sounds, and sends them by a special nerve to the brain.

If the earth stood still, or if light spent no time on the road from the stars, such an effect would not exist. Its amount represents the proportion between the velocities with which the earth and the light-rays pursue their respective journeys. This proportion is, roughly, one to ten thousand.

In a rather cold light, made pallid by those green curtains that hang all around, in which one would fancy that the light-rays become rarefied, in order to give to the vision of the people walking about the room a certain contemplative justice, the slow crowd goes and comes, pauses, disperses itself over the seats in serried groups, and yet mixing up different sections of society more thoroughly than any other assembly, just as the weather, uncertain and changeable at this time of the year, produces a confusion in the world of clothes, causes to brush each other as they pass, the black laces, the imperious train of the great lady come to see how her portrait looks, and the Siberian furs of the actress just back from Russia and anxious that everybody should know it.

During the afternoon a bomb of some kind it was vaguely described as a variation of the red and green light-rays had destroyed one of the trains near Garland. The road was now open only down to Frannie. The town of Byron, I learned, was completely annihilated. It had been swept by the Mercutian Light and destroyed by fire. Garland was as yet unharmed.

I understood, then, and for ever after, the pure devotion of the old knights and troubadours of chivalry. I seemed to myself to be their brother one of the holy guild of poet-lovers. I was a new Petrarch, basking in the light-rays of a new Laura. I gazed, and gazed, and found new life in gazing, and was content.

But how can we see anything there? I always thought that I knew something about rays, but I see that I do not. The light-rays must be released, or deheterodyned, close to the object viewed, with nothing opaque to light intervening. They must then be reflected from the object seen, must be gathered together, again heterodyned upon the fifth-order carrier, and retransmitted back to us.

We flashed on our little light-rays, and in a moment the sulphur was on fire at a score of different points. We drew off a few hundred feet to one side and sat down to watch it in the darkness. Overhead Tao's red beams swept like giant search-lights across the inky sky. The sulphur started burning with tiny little spots of wavering blue flame that seemed, many of them, about to die away.