ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE PHOSPHORI. 113 



per for use. The servant immediately made his master acquainted 

 with this extraordinary appearance ; and though he was then hi 

 bed, he ordered it to be immediately brought to him, and he exa- 

 rained it with the greatest attention. Suspecting that the btate of 

 the atmosphere had some share in the production of this phenome- 

 non, he takes notice, after describing the appearance, that the wind 

 was south. west and blustering, the air hot for the season, the moon 

 was past its last quarter, and the mercury in the barometer was at 

 29 3.16th inches. 



Mr. Boyle was often disappointed in his experiments on shining 

 fishes ; finding that they did not always shine in the very same cir. 

 cumstances, as far as he could judge, with others which had shined 

 before. At one time that they failed to shine, according to his 

 expectations, he observed that the weather was variable, and not 

 without some days of frost and snow. In general he made use of 

 whitings, rinding them the fittest for his purpose. In a discourse, 

 however, upon this subject at the Royal Society, in 1681, it wa$ 

 asserted, that, of all fishy substances, the eggs of lobsters, after they 

 had been boiled, shone the brightest. Olig. Jacobaeus observes*, 

 that, upon opening a sea polype, it was so luminous as to startle 

 .several persons who saw it ; and he says (but incorrectly according 

 to later experiments) that the more putrid the fish was, the mor 

 luminous it grew. The nails also, and the fingers of the persons 

 who touched it, became luminous; and the black liquor which 

 issued from the animal, and which is its bile, shone also, but with 

 a very faint light. 



Mr. Boyle draws a minute comparison between the light of 

 burning coals and that of shining wood or fish, showing in what par. 

 ticulars they agree, and in what they differ. Among other things 

 be observes, that extreme cold extinguishes the light of shining 

 wood, as appeared when a piece of it was put into a glass tube, and 

 held in a frigorific mixture, a fact which minutely agrees with Dr. 

 Holmes' more modern experiments upon dead animal matter. He 

 also found that rotten wood did not waste itself by shining, and that 

 the application of a thermometer to it did not discover the least de- 

 gree of heat. 



The shell-fish called pholas, or phloas, which forms for itself 

 holes in various kinds of stone, &c. was one of the earliest subjects 



* Act, Uafo. vol. v. p. 28S. 

 TOL. VI. I 



