e insects and other creatures of the lower animal kingdom which
possess the peculiar quality of phosphorescence.

There are numerous cases of spontaneous combustion of the human body
reported by the older writers. Bartholinus mentions an instance after
the person had drunk too much wine. Fouquet mentions a person ignited
by lightning. Schrader speaks of a person from whose mouth and fauces
after a debauch issued fire. Schurig tells of flames issuing from the
vulva, and Moscati records the same occurrence in parturition,
Sinibaldust, Borellus, and Bierling have also written on this subject,
and the Ephemerides contains a number of instances.

In 1763 Bianchini, Prebendary of Verona, published an account of the
death of Countess Cornelia Bandi of Cesena, who in her sixty-second
year was consumed by a fire kindled in her own body. In explanation
Bianchini said that the fire was caused in the entrails by the inflamed
effluvia of the blood, by the juices and fermentation in the stomach,
and, lastly, by fiery evaporations which exhaled from the spirits of
wine, brandy, etc. In the Gentleman's Magazine, 1763, there is recorded
an account of three noblemen who, in emulation, drank great quantities
of strong liquor, and two of them died scorched and suffocated by a
flame forcing itself from the stomach. There is an account of a poor
woman in Paris in the last century who drank plentifully of spirits,
for three years taking virtually nothing else. Her body became so
combustible that one night while lying on a straw couch she was
spontaneously burned to ashes and smoke. The evident cause of this
combustion is too plain to be commented on. In the Lancet, 1845, there
are two cases reported in which shortly before death luminous breath
has been seen to issue from the mouth.

There is an instance reported of a professor of mathematics of
thirty-five years of age and temperate, who, feeling a pain in his left
leg, discovered a pale flame about the size of a ten-cent piece issuing
therefrom. As recent as March, 1850, in a Court of Assizes in Darmstadt
during the trial of John Stauff, accused of the murder of the Countess
Goerlitz, the counsel for the defense advanced the theory of
spontaneous human combustion, and such eminent doctors as von Siebold,
Graff, von Liebig, and other prominent members of the Hessian medical
fraternity were called to comment on its possibility; principally on
their testimony a conviction and life-imprison