transparent walls, as a candle is carried within a lantern. The fair
observer says that the first discovery which she made of this property
caused her no small alarm. The Indians had brought her several of these
insects, which by daylight exhibited no extraordinary appearance, and
she enclosed them in a box until she should have an opportunity of
drawing them, placing it upon a table in her lodging-room. In the middle
of the night the confined insects made such a noise as to awake her, and
she opened the box, the inside of which, to her great astonishment,
appeared all in a blaze; and in her fright letting it fall, she was not
less surprised to see each of the insects apparently on fire. She soon,
however, divined the cause of this unexpected phenomenon, and
re-enclosed her brilliant guests in their place of confinement. She adds
that the light of one of these Fulgorae is sufficiently bright to read a
newspaper by: and though the tale of her having drawn one of these
insects by its own light is without foundation, she doubtless might have
done so if she had chosen.

This circumstantial and apparently truthful statement has brought no
small odium on the fair narrator. Other naturalists who have had
opportunities of seeing the insect in its native regions strongly deny
its luminosity. The inhabitants of Cayenne, according to the French
Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle, aver that it does not shine at all;
and this is confirmed by M. Richard, a naturalist, who reared the
species. The learned and accurate Count Hoffmansegg states that his
insect collector Herr Sieber, a practised entomologist of thirty years'
experience, who during a sojourn of several years in Brazil took many
specimens of the _Fulgora lanternaria_, never saw a single one which was
in the slightest degree luminous. There is a kindred species in China,
_F. candelaria_, very common in those glazed boxes of insects which the
Chinese sell to mariners; this also has been supposed to emit light, but
Dr Cantor assures us that he has never observed the least luminosity in
this species.

Thus it would seem that the obloquy which has fallen upon the ingenious
lady is not altogether undeserved, and that for the sake of a telling
story, she has been indeed "telling a story." But we may imagine her
offended ghost looking round and saying, "All these gentlemen merely say
they have _not_ seen the light; now I say I have: is there no one who
will verify my statement?"