This circumstantial and apparently truthful statement has brought no small odium on the fair narrator. Other naturalists who have had opportunities of seeing the insect in its native regions strongly deny its luminosity. The inhabitants of Cayenne, according to the French Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle, aver that it does not shine at all; and this is confirmed by M. Richard, a naturalist, who reared the species. The learned and accurate Count Hoffmansegg states that his insect collector Herr Sieber, a practised entomologist of thirty years' experience, who during a sojourn of several years in Brazil took many specimens of the _Fulgora lanternaria_, never saw a single one which was in the slightest degree luminous. There is a kindred species in China, _F. candelaria_, very common in those glazed boxes of insects which the Chinese sell to mariners; this also has been supposed to emit light, but Dr Cantor assures us that he has never observed the least luminosity in this species. Thus it would seem that the obloquy which has fallen upon the ingenious lady is not altogether undeserved, and that for the sake of a telling story, she has been indeed "telling a story." But we may imagine her offended ghost looking round and saying, "All these gentlemen merely say they have _not_ seen the light; now I say I have: is there no one who will verify my statement?" M. Lacordaire,--an authority on South American insects second to none, says that he himself indeed never saw a luminous _Fulgora_ all the time he was collecting in Brazil and Cayenne, and that most of the inhabitants of the latter country, when questioned on the subject, denied the fact, yet _that others of the natives as distinctly affirmed that it is luminous_. He asks whether it is not possible that the light may be confined to one sex, and thus the conflicting testimony be reconciled; and gives it as his opinion that the point is rather one which requires more careful observation, than one which we can consider absolutely decided.[150] Again, the Marquis Spinola, in an elaborate paper on this tribe, published in the Annals of the Entomological Society of France,[151] strenuously contends that the remarkable development of the frontal portion of the head in the whole race is luminous. And finally, a friend of Mr Wesmael assured him that he had himself seen the American _Fulgora_ luminous while alive.[152]