The phenomena of spiritual photography were first observed some years since, and a set of carte photographs were sent from America to Dr. Walker, of Edinburgh, in which photographic phantoms were very obviously, however indistinctly, discernible. More recently an English photographer noticed a yet stranger circumstance, though he was too sensible to seek for a supernatural interpretation of it. When he took a photograph with a particular lens, there could be seen not only the usual portrait of the sitter, but at some little distance a faint ‘double,’ exactly resembling the principal image. Superstitious minds might find this result even more distressing than the phantom photographic friend. To be visited by the departed through the medium of a lens, is at least not more unpleasing than to hold converse with spirits through an ordinary ‘rapping’ medium. But the appearance of a ‘double,’ or ‘fetch,’ has ever been held by the learned in ghostly lore to signify approaching death. Fortunately both one and the other appearance can be very easily accounted for without calling in the aid of the supernatural. At a recent meeting of the Photographical Society it was shown that an image may often be so deeply impressed on the glass that the subsequent cleaning of the plate, even with strong acids, will not completely remove the picture. When the plate is used for receiving another picture, the original image makes its reappearance, and as it is too faint to be recognisable, a highly susceptible imagination may readily transform it into the image of a departed friend. The ‘double’ is generated by the well-known property of double refraction, obtained by a lens under certain circumstances of unequal pressure, or sometimes by inequalities in the process of annealing. So vanish two ghosts which might have been more or less troublesome to those who are ready to see the supernatural in commonplace phenomena. Will the time ever come when no more such phantoms will remain to be exorcised? (From the _Daily News_, March 2, 1869.) _THE OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE ROWING STYLES._