SUBJECTIVE FUNCTIONS OP THE EYE. 249 



The first rare and transient indeed compared with 

 the other is the appearance to the closed eye of 

 several lines, four, five, or six, of printed type, not 

 exactly of the same length, nor exactly parallel, with 

 divisions as of separate words seeming as if easy to 

 be read, yet mocking, by speedy confusion or disap- 

 pearance, the attempt to read them. This spectrum 

 rarely lasts more than thirty or forty seconds. In 

 some cases I can connect it, from the configuration of 

 the image, with the recent act of reading ; but at 

 other times it occurs after the eyes have been long 

 closed in sleep or otherwise. I do not recollect to 

 have noticed this appearance until within the last year 

 or two. 



The second phenomenon is also one of recent obser- 

 vation, though, as there is required an act of will or 

 attention to be conscious of it, the physical condition 

 implied may have existed before without such con- 

 sciousness. When in the first approach of sleep, the 

 eyes being closed, I direct attention to the organ of 

 vision, a luminous spectrum of whitish green light ap- 

 pears, as if coming laterally upon the eye, about the 

 size of a common watch-glass, and nearly circular in 

 its outline, but indented in its circumference by five or 

 six conical notches, and intersected in its area by a 

 sort of network of dark lines, presenting occasionally 

 somewhat of a regular configuration, but none that can 

 be defined as constant. This luminous circle is visible 

 as such for two or three seconds ; it then contracts 

 itself equably from the circumference inwards, till 

 nothing is left but a central bright nucleus. At the 



