BOOK OF THE DAMNED 263 



the sea. But it was only a faint light, and, in about fifteen min- 

 utes, died out: having appeared suddenly; having died out grad- 

 ually. 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 $th 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, illu- 

 minated 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 ap- 

 parently 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 



