tem,
leaves, and a flower; in a word, they perceive the apparition of a
plant springing from its ashes. As soon as the warmth ceases, all the
spectacle vanishes, the matter deranges itself and falls to the bottom
of the vessel, to form there a new chaos. The return of heat
resuscitates this vegetable phoenix, hidden in its ashes. And as the
presence of warmth gives it life, its absence causes its death.

"Father Kircher, who tries to give a reason for this admirable
phenomenon, says that the seminal virtue of every mixture is
concentrated in the salts, and that as soon as warmth sets them in
motion they rise directly and circulate like a whirlwind in this glass
vessel. These salts, in this suspension, which gives them liberty to
arrange themselves, take the same situation and form the same figure
as nature had primitively bestowed on them; retaining the inclination
to become what they had been, they return to their first destination,
and form themselves into the same lines as they occupied in the living
plant; each corpuscle of salt re-entering its original arrangement
which it received from nature; those which were at the foot of the
plant place themselves there; in the same manner, those which compose
the top of the stem, the branches, the leaves, and the flowers, resume
their former place, and thus form a perfect apparition of the whole
plant.

"It is affirmed that this operation has been performed upon a
sparrow;[669] and the gentlemen of the Royal Society of England, who
are making their experiments on this matter, hope to succeed in making
them on human beings also.[670]

"Now, according to the principle of Father Kircher and the most
learned chemists, who assert that the substantial form of bodies
resides in the salts, and that these salts, set in motion by warmth,
form the same figure as that which had been given to them by nature,
it is not difficult to comprehend that dead bodies being consumed away
in the earth, the salts which exhale from them with the vapors, by
means of the fermentations which so often occur in this element, may
very well, in arranging themselves above ground, form those shadows
and phantoms which have frightened so many people. Thus we may
perceive how little reason there is to ascribe them to the return of
spirits, or to demons, as some ignorant people have done.

"To all the authorities by means of which I have combated the
apparitions of spirits which are in purgatory, I shall sti