“Photograph taken by me in July 1895, in the country. The gamekeeper Crepet is giving to 300 young partridges some ant eggs, which he is taking from a sack. The small birds are covered over by the entire black part of the negative, whilst a quantity of small life animules are freeing themselves from the eggs or from the ants. Is it the emanation of the gamekeeper, or that of the partridges? I took two photos whilst the gamekeeper was throwing handfuls of dust and of eggs. Both are identical. I took two other photos when he was giving them cooked chicken eggs mixed with bread crumbs. In these there is nothing special, the photograph is sharp. It may be concluded from this, that the signature of the life-animules and the black volatile odic shower come from the ants giving up their vitality.”

Featured on PDR in the collection Imaging Inscape: The Human Soul (1913)

In The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) postulates the existence of “the fluidic invisible” — a “vital cosmic force”, which he calls Odic liquid, that extends across the universe and “saturates the organism of living beings and constitutes our fluidic body”. Instead of all things being composed of one elementary substance, as in philosophical accounts of the monad, in this cosmic vision, we all live in a sea that we cannot see, which Baraduc names Somod.