A most curious account of what we may call "natural
pho- tography" comes to us from Florence. On the 15th April, 2nd June, and 22nd August of last year occurred murders of three housekeepers in Florence, committed apparently under precisely the same conditions, by someone who had access to each house when the woman of the house was alone, who cut his victim's throat from ear to ear, and who left a pocket handkerchief of his own on each occasion beside the corpse. After each murder the superin- tendent of police, Leopoldo Viti, applied to have the eyes of the dead women photographed, but only in the last instance was the request granted. Alinari, the first photographer of Floeence, made the photograph, and then greatly enlarged it, when there became visible in the enlarged photograph a dim outline of a human face—supposed of course to be the murderer—which had been, that is the theory, printed on the retina as the dying eye glazed. These photographs were made under the direction of the Judge, Signor Marabotti. In the mean- time suspicion had fallen on a man called Benjamin° di Cosimo, who was apprehended, and property of all three murdered women found, with a bloody knife, and the image left on the dead woman's retina is said to be a likeness of this man The correspon- dent of the Morning Post, who tells the story, and had himself seen the enlarged photograph and the prisoner, says he will not answer for the identity, but all ;narked features in the dim photograph and the prisoner are the same, a peculiar dilatation of the nostril, a depres- sion in the lip where two teeth had been lost, an unusual elonga- tion of the chin, a wide cheek-bone, and the outline of a whisker. If this be true, we suppose all dying eyes photograph the last images left upon the retina,—nay, perhaps that every eye, living or dead, is like a photographer's plate, when one picture has been taken over another so as to obliterate it superficially, but leave its record deep in the plate nevertheless ;—it would be a strange incar- nation of the law of memory.
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