In this country, several who are amateur photographers have investigated this subject with more or less success. These include some F.R.S.’s, scientists, artists, and others. I question whether any have so persistently done so as the late Mr. John Beattie, of Clifton, and his friend, Dr. Thompson. Mr. Beattie was a skilled professional photographer of the highest eminence who, some time prior to his death, had adopted the views of the spiritualistic school. The figures he obtained on his plates were much blurred in outline, some being misty in the extreme. I possess some two or three dozen of these, taken by or in the presence of, Mr. Beattie, whose intelligence, honesty, and powers of observation no one would venture to doubt. Many such photographs are claimed to have been produced by Hudson, a professional photographer, formerly of the Holloway Road, and I submit for examination a work by the late Miss Houghton, containing fifty-four of Hudson’s spirit photographs.
There are many ways by which, assuming the genuineness of only one of all spirit photographs hitherto produced, the spurious article may be made even better than any alleged real ones I have yet seen. A plate secretly impressed previous or subsequent to being placed in the camera fulfils the condition; so does one at the back of which is placed a phosphorescent tablet in the dark slide. Pressure on the surface, such as by that of a Woodbury relief film, also causes a developable image; in short, trickery in a whole variety of forms may, and has been, impressed into the service.
The higher department of fluorescence may with success be employed. Here is something to which believers in the visibility of spirit forms to a camera are quite welcome. At the time, and _àpropos_ of the Mumler trial in New York, I wrote that a good many absurd things have been said _pro_ and _con_ on the subject; but a writer in the latter category, who asserted that anything that is visible to the eye of the camera, and thus capable of being depicted by photography, must therefore necessarily be visible to the human eye, was surely ignorant of that important branch of physics popularly known as fluorescence. Many things are capable of being photographed which to the physical eye are utterly invisible. Why, for that matter, a room (visually dark) may be full of the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum, and a photograph may be taken in that dark light. Objects in a room so lighted would be plainly visible to the lens of the camera—at any rate, they could be reproduced on the sensitive plate, while, at the same time, not an atom of luminousness could be perceived in the room by any person possessing ordinary or normal vision. Hence the photographing of an invisible image, whether it be of a spirit or a lump of matter is not scientifically impossible. If it reflect only the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum, it will be easily photographed, although quite invisible to the sharpest eye.