302 BARON REICHENBACH'S 



own or any ordinary eyes were concerned ; but a success when 

 the more delicate eyes of Mademoiselle Maix and his other 

 experimental young ladies were called into operation. 



These sensitive individuals described the magnetic light 

 concentrated into a focus, as retaining its primitive and normal 

 image; and a remarkable fact was, that whereas the lens's 

 focal length for ordinary wax-taper light was only 12 inches, 

 the light being 18 inches distant, the focal length of the same 

 for magnetic light amounted to 4J feet. The immediate phy- 

 sical testimony recorded by the baron was more remarkable 

 still, and it should be the more conclusive, inasmuch as what- 

 ever of uncertainty might belong to the indications of his four 

 young ladies and the delicate boy was eliminated. The baron 

 states that a metallic plate having been made sensitive by 

 Daguerre's process, then placed in a box, the box enveloped 

 in flannel a double treatment whereby all ordinary light 

 must necessarily have been excluded still, after exposure 

 during some hours to magnetic influence, the plate, being re- 

 moved, was found to have a daguerreotype picture upon it. 



I pause here to demur to the baron's logic. He affirms 

 that no ordinary light can get through a deal box enclosed in 

 a blanket. Granted. We will all of us admit that much, 

 and I think even more. Light, to have found its way through 

 such an envelope, must have been very extraordinary. How 

 could the baron have known that his extraordinary light did 

 get in, except he had put one of his young ladies or the puny 

 boy in the box to see it? Admitting the correctness of all 

 he said about the development of a picture on the daguerreo- 

 type plate, the result only shows that the development was 

 referable to some cause unexplained ; not by any means that 

 it was attributable to light. 



If I have paused to make this objection, it has not been 

 through captiousness ; indeed, the baron, as a scientific man, 

 could^not help admitting that, in matters of scientific debate, 

 no possible objection founded on reason is ever regarded as 



