4:66 Mr. C. Tomlinson on the Ignis Fatuus. 



improved of late years, seeing that they owe many of their 

 leading articles to competent writers, yet it must be admitted 

 that the very considerable number of short articles are en- 

 trusted to inferior hands. I was anxious to see how such com- 

 pilers might be led, or misled, by consulting the article Ignis 

 Fatuus in three well-known Cyclopaedias. The first reference 

 is to the "English Cyclopaedia " (Arts and Sciences Division), 

 1860, where there is a short article under Ignis Fatuus, a 

 meteor resembling a flame which is vaguely said to do a 

 number of things and may be seen over marshes or burial- 

 grounds, and a case is related in which a weak blue flame 

 came up from the sea, and burnt some ricks of hay. It is 

 also stated that " such meteors are most usually witnessed 

 during a fall of rain or snow." After referring to some 

 other cases the writer remarks, " Little confidence can be 

 placed in the descriptions given of them, as few persons have 

 been able to examine them with due attention ; and commonly 

 they have been observed under the influence of an ill-regulated 

 imagination rather than a philosphical spirit/' That such 

 meteors are due to phosphuretted or carburetted hydrogen 

 gas is termed " a plausible hypothesis," but " there is a great 

 dearth of satisfactory observations on moving lights seen in 

 nature, and the entire subject is at present in obscurity." 



The second example is from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 

 ninth edition, 1885, where the subject, oddly enough, is 

 treated in a few lines under Phosphorescence, which is said to 

 be "a name given to various phenomena due to different 

 causes, but all consisting in the emission of a pale, more or 

 less ill-defined light, not obviously due to combustion." It 

 is stated that Ignis Fatuus, as seen in marshy districts, has 

 given rise to much difference of opinion. Kirby and Spence 

 suggested that it might be due to luminous insects, " but it 

 is more reasonable to believe that the phenomenon is caused 

 by the slow T?] combustion of marsh-gas." 



In Chambers's Cyclopaedia, " A Dictionary of Universal 

 Knowledge," New Edition, vol. vi. 1890, we have much 

 excellent writing in the longer articles, and only a feeble 

 grasp of subject in some of the shorter ones. There is the 

 same uncertainty in the treatment of Ignis Fatuus*, and the 

 same confusion as in the earlier writers, arising from the 

 application of the same term to meteors of very different 

 origin. The article begins by stating that Ignis Fatuus " is 

 a luminous appearance of uncertain nature which is occa- 



* This article seems to have been entirely derived from the article 

 Irrlichter in the Konversotions-Lexicon. 



