120 



dance of these plants was so great, that the roof, walls, 

 and pillars were entirely covered with them, and the 

 beautiful light they cast around almost dazzled the 

 eye. The light they give out is like faint moonshine, 

 so that two persons near to each other could readily 

 distinguish the outlines of their bodies. The light 

 appears to be most considerable when the tempera- 

 ture of the mines is comparatively high." Mr. de 

 Luc mentions and describes a luminous phenomenon 

 he observed in cavities in the granitic mountains 

 which form the boundary line between Bayreuth and 

 Bohemia; a very pretty mass it appears lines these 

 cavities, exhibiting a chatoyant lustre of an emerald 

 green colour. A correspondent in the Magazine of 

 Natural History mentions a similar phenomenon near 

 Penryn, Cornwall, which possessed a most beautiful 

 emerald green colour, accompanied with a phospho- 

 rescent brilliancy,' and proceeded from a small moss 

 much resembling the dicranium taxifolium. What 

 have been called " shooting stars," and found sparkling 

 on the ground, seem to be the tremella meteorica, and 

 have been observed apparently to fall from the air. 

 Thus on the night previous to the battle of Brandy- 

 wine, a shooting star was observed by one of the 

 sentinels to fall at no great distance ; it proved to be 

 a sparkling gelatinous mass. 



Among exotic luminous insects we may enumerate, 

 as the most remarkable, the pausus splicer oceros, elater 

 noctilucus, and two species of fulgora. The pausus 

 sphceroceros * was caught by Afzelius, in 1 VQ , at 

 Thornton Hill, in the vicinity of Sierra Leone, having 

 fallen from the ceiling of the house on the table : it 

 appears to live in wood, and to prefer new built 



* See Plate, fig. 3. 



