Issachar Marx, author of the Polish versions of "Wallenstein" and "Gargantua", often referred to the art of photography as a "black science", a "pale, hideous lifeless mockery and corruption of true nature", but interestingly enough, in his "Bibliotheca Forensica", he includes many examples of Daguerreian plates of portraits of the deceased which he claims can provide proof of the afterlife due to minute alterations of expressions of the expired produced by the intoning of arcane chants in the mortuary. Al Hazrad, the Arab phrenologist, provided many of these multi-phonic hymns which he claims were recovered from several 18,000 year old manuscripts uncovered in an unmapped Babylonian cave.
There are only a few copies of "Bibliotheca Forensica" extant. One may view a copy in one of the sealed antiquarian book reading rooms in the old long quarantined library in Arkham, Mass, but there is a seven year waiting list.
It is well worth seeking out a copy and may corroborate many of the hotly contested opinions I have expressed herein.
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