SPECIFICATION filed in pursuance of the conditions of the Letters Patent, and of an Order of the Lord Chancellor, by the said Henry Dircks and John Henry Pepper in the Great Seal Patent Office on the 31ˢᵗ October 1863. TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, we, HENRY DIRCKS, of Blackheath, in the County of Kent, Civil Engineer, and JOHN HENRY PEPPER, of No. 309, Regent Street, in the County of Middlesex, Professor of Chemistry, and Honorary Director of the Polytechnic Institution, send greeting. WHEREAS Her most Excellent Majesty Queen Victoria, by Her Letters Patent, bearing Date the Fifth Day of February, in the year of our Lord One thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, in the twenty-sixth year of Her reign, did, for Herself, Her heirs and successors, give and grant unto us, the said Henry Dircks and John Henry Pepper, Her special licence that we, the said Henry Dircks and John Henry Pepper, our executors, administrators, and assigns, or such others as we, the said Henry Dircks and John Henry Pepper, our executors, administrators, and assigns, should at any time agree with, and no others, from time to time and at all times thereafter during the term therein expressed, should and lawfully might make, use, exercise, and vend, within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Channel Islands, and Isle of Man, an Invention for “IMPROVEMENTS IN APPARATUS TO BE USED IN THE EXHIBITION OF DRAMATIC AND OTHER LIKE PERFORMANCES,” upon the condition (amongst others) that we, the said Henry Dircks and John Henry Pepper, our executors or administrators, by an instrument in writing under our or their hands and seals, or under the hand and seal of one of us or them, should particularly describe and ascertain the nature of the said Invention, and in what manner the same was to be performed, and cause the same to be filed in the Great Seal Patent Office on or before the Third day of November, in the year of our Lord One thousand eight hundred and sixty-three. NOW KNOW YE, that I, the said John Henry Pepper, on behalf of myself and the said Henry Dircks, do hereby declare the nature of the said Invention, and in what manner the same is to be performed, to be particularly described and ascertained in and by the following statement thereof, that is to say:— The nature and object of our said Invention is by a peculiar arrangement of apparatus to associate on the same stage a phantom or phantoms with a living actor or actors, so that the two may act in concert, but which is only an optical illusion as respects the one or more phantoms so introduced.