ster," he respectfully began, "I saw at home in Denmark, a
poor devil, picked up dying, half devoured by a wolf; and who, when
taken from the very jaws of the beast, still retained in the eye a very
visible image in which one could see the nose and teeth of the brute. A
vision! Imagination, perhaps! But the fact struck me at the time and we
made a note of it."

"And?" questioned M. Morin, in a tone of raillery.

Bernardet cocked his ears as a dog does when he hears an unusual sound.
M. Ginory looked at this slender young man with his long blond hair, his
eyes as blue as the waters of a lake, his face pale and wearing the
peculiar look common to searchers after the mysterious. The students and
the others gathered about their master, remained motionless and listened
intently as to a lecture.

"And," Dr. Erwin went on frigidly, "if we had found absolutely nothing
we would, at least, have kept silent about an unsuccessful research, it
is useless to say. Think, then, my dear Master, the exterior objects
must have imprinted themselves on the retina, did they not? reduced in
size, according to the size of the place wherein they were reflected;
they appeared there, they certainly appeared there! There is--I beg your
pardon for referring to it, but it is to these others (and Dr. Erwin
designated M. Ginory, his registrar, and Bernardet)--there is in the
retina a substance of a red color, the _pourpre retinien_, very
sensitive to the light. Upon the deep red of this membrane objects are
seen white. And one can fix the image. M. Edmond Perrier, professor in
the Museum of Natural History, reports (you know it better than I, my
dear Master), in a work on animal anatomy and physiology which our
students are all familiar with, that he made an experiment. After
removing a rabbit's eye, a living rabbit's eye--yes, science is
cruel--he placed it in a dark room, so that he could obtain upon the
retina the image of some object, a window for instance, and plunged it
immediately into a solution of alum and prevented the decomposition of
the _pourpre retinien_, and the window could plainly be seen, fixed on
the eye. In that black chamber which we have under our eyebrows, in the
orbit, is a storehouse, a storehouse of images which are retained, like
the image which the old Dane's eye held of the wolf's nose and teeth.
And who knows? Perhaps it is possible to ask of a dead man's eye the
secret of what it saw when living."

This was, put in m