Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/269

Rh the sea. But it was only a faint light, and, in about fifteen minutes, died out: having appeared suddenly; having died out gradually. The shafts revolved at a velocity of about 60 miles an hour.

Phosphorescent jelly fish correlate with the Old Dominant: in one of the most heroic compositions of disregards in our experience, it was agreed, in the discussion of Capt. Hoseason's paper, that the phenomenon was probably pulsations of long strings of jelly fish.

Nature, 21-410:

Reprint of a letter from R. E. Harris, Commander of the A. H. N. Co.'s steamship Shahjehan, to the Calcutta Englishman, Jan. 21, 1880:

That upon the 5th of June, 1880, off the coast of Malabar, at 10 p. m., water calm, sky cloudless, he had seen something that was so foreign to anything that he had ever seen before, that he had stopped his ship. He saw what he describes as waves of brilliant light, with spaces between. Upon the water were floating patches of a substance that was not identified. Thinking in terms of the conventional explanation of all phosphorescence at sea, the Captain at first suspected this substance. However, he gives his opinion that it did no illuminating but was, with the rest of the sea, illuminated by tremendous shafts of light. Whether it was a thick and oily discharge from the engine of a submerged construction or not, I think that I shall have to accept this substance as a concomitant, because of another note. "As wave succeeded wave, one of the most grand and brilliant, yet solemn, spectacles that one could think of, was here witnessed."

''Jour. Roy. Met. Soc.'', 32-280:

Extract from a letter from Mr. Douglas Carnegie, Blackheath, England. Date some time in 1906 "This last voyage we witnessed a weird and most extraordinary electric display." In the Gulf of Oman, he saw a bank of apparently quiescent phosphorescence: but, when within twenty yards of it, "shafts of brilliant light came sweeping across the ship's bows at a prodigious speed, which might be put down as anything between 60 and 200 miles an hour." "These light bars were about 20 feet apart and most regular." As to phosphorescence—"I collected a bucketful of water, and examined it under the microscope, but could not detect anything abnormal." That the shafts of light came up from something beneath the surface—"They first struck us on our broadside, and I noticed that an intervening ship had no effect on