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Nature Notes: 
THE SELBORNE SOCIETrS MAGAZINE.. 
No. 221. MAY, 1908. VoL. XIX. 
LUMINANCE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 
HERE are few subjects more curious, and none, perhaps, 
less understood, than the occasional luminance of cer- 
tain plants and animals. The writer does not allude 
to that phosphorescence which arises from decomposing 
substances, and which everyone must have observed on putrid 
fish, decaying fungi, and the like ; but to those luminous appear- 
ances exhibited under peculiar conditions by living structures, 
as, for example, by the flowers of the marigold and by the female 
fire-fly. The former phenomena are owing to an actual com- 
bustion of phosphoric matter in the atmosphere, precisely similar 
to that which takes place when we rub a stick of phosphorus on 
the walls of a dark chamber ; the latter belong to peculiar states 
of growth and excitement, and seem at times to be ascribable 
to electricity, at others to phosphorescence, and not infre- 
quently to plain optical principles. 
Flowers of an orange colour, as the marigold and nasturtium, 
occasionally present a luminous appearance on still, warm even- 
ings ; this light being either in the form of faint electric sparks, 
or steadier, like the phosphorescence of the glow-worm. The 
tube rose has also been observed on sultry evenings, after 
thunder, when the air was highly charged with electric fluid, to 
emit small scintillations, in great abundance, from such of its 
flowers as were fading. Several of the fungi which grow in 
warm and damp places manifest a similar luminosity, and that 
when in their most healthy and vigorous state. The spawn of 
the truffle, the most esteemed of the fungus family, is also 
accounted luminous ; and, from this circumstance, may be col- 
lected at night in the truffle-grounds. Some varieties of the 
lichens are occasionally phosphorescent, and are more or less 
luminous in the dark. 
A plant, the true family of which has not yet been ascer- 
tained, was discovered by an Englishman in a jungle in East 
