Page:Arthur B Reeve - The Dream Doctor.djvu/347

. It had slipped and had injured the body of Montague Phelps. From the injury some drops had oozed. My spectroscope tells me that that, too, is blood. The blood and other muscular and nervous fluids of the body had remained in an aqueous condition instead of becoming pectous. That is a remarkable circumstance."

It flashed over me what Kennedy had been driving at in his inquiry regarding embalming. If the poisons of the embalming fluid had not been injected, he had now clear proof regarding anything his spectroscope discovered.

"I had expected to find a poison, perhaps an alkaloid," he continued slowly, as he outlined his discoveries by the use of one of the most fascinating branches of modern science, spectroscopy. "In cases of poisoning by these substances, the spectroscope often has obvious advantages over chemical methods, for minute amounts will produce a well-defined spectrum. The spectroscope 'spots' the substance, to use a police idiom, the moment the case is turned over to it. There was no poison there." He had raised his voice to emphasise the startling revelation. "Instead, I found an extraordinary amount of the substance and products of glycogen. The liver, where this substance is stored, is literally surcharged in the body of Phelps."

He had started his moving-picture machine.

"Here I have one of the latest developments in the moving-picture art," he resumed, "an X-ray moving picture, a feat which was until recently visionary, a science now in its infancy, bearing the formidable