After this, one begins to recognise the manner in which some diseases propagate themselves. What had been mysterious in the history of plagues and pestilences seems to receive at least a partial solution. Take cholera, for example. It has been shown by the clearest and most positive evidence that this disease is not propagated in any way save one—that is, by the actual swallowing of the cholera poison. In Professor Thudichum’s masterly paper on the subject in the ‘Monthly Microscopical Journal,’ it is stated that doctors have inhaled a full breathing from a person in the last stage of this terrible malady without any evil effects. Yet the minutest atom of the cholera poison received into the stomach will cause an attack of cholera. A small quantity of this matter drying on the floor of the patient’s room, and afterwards caused to float about in the form of dust, would suffice to prostrate a houseful of people. We can understand, then, how matter might be flung into the streets, and, after drying, its dust be wafted through a whole district, causing the death of hundreds. One of the lessons to be learned from these interesting researches of Mr. Dancer is clearly this, that the watering-cart should be regarded as one of the most important of our hygienic institutions. Supplemented by careful scavengering, it might be effective in dispossessing many a terrible malady which now holds sway from time to time over our towns.
(From the Daily News, March 6, 1869.)
PHOTOGRAPHIC GHOSTS.
On the outskirts of the ever-widening circle lighted up by science there is always a border-land wherein superstition holds sway. ‘The arts and sciences may drive away the vulgar hobgoblin of darker days; but they bring with them new sources of illusion. The ghosts of old could only gibber; the spirits of our day can read and write, and play on divers musical instruments, and quote Shakespeare and Milton. It is not, therefore, altogether surprising to learn that they can take photographs also. You go to have your photograph taken, we will suppose, desiring only to see your own features depicted in the carte; and lo! the spirits have been at work, and a photographic phantom makes its appearance beside you. It is true this phantom is of a hazy and dubious aspect: the ‘dull mechanic ghost’ is indistinct, and may be taken for anyone. Still, it is not difficult for the eye of fancy to trace in it the lineaments of some departed friend, who, it is to be assumed, has come to be photographed along with you. In fact, photography, according to the spiritualist, resembles what Byron called—
The lightning of the mind,
Which out of things familiar, undesigned,
When least we deem of such, calls up to view
The spectres whom no exorcism can bind.
The phenomena of spiritual photography were first observed some years since, and a set of carte photographs were sent from America to Dr. Walker, of Edinburgh, in which photographic phantoms were very obviously, however indistinctly, discernible. More recently an English photographer noticed a yet stranger circumstance, though he was too sensible to seek for a supernatural interpretation of it. When he took a photograph with a particular lens, there could be seen not only the usual portrait of the sitter, but at some little distance a faint ‘double,’ exactly resembling the principal image. Superstitious minds might find this result even more distressing than the phantom photographic friend. To be visited by the departed through the medium of a lens, is at least not more unpleasing than to hold converse with spirits through an ordinary ‘rapping’ medium. But the appearance of a ‘double,’ or ‘fetch,’ has ever been held by the learned in ghostly lore to signify approaching death.