Page:A history of the theories of aether and electricity. Whittacker E.T. (1910).pdf/129

 ordinary ray given by Huygens had lain neglected for a century; and the degree of accuracy with which it represented the observations was unknown. At Young's suggestion Wollaston investigated the matter experimentally, and showed that the agreement between his own measurements and Huygeus' rule was remarkably close. "I think," he wrote, "the result must be admitted to be highly favourable to the Huygenian theory; and, although the existence of two refractions at the same time, in the same substance, be not well accounted for, and still less. their interchange with each other, when a ray of light is made to pass through a second piece of spar situated transversely to the first, yet the oblique refraction, when considered alone, seems nearly as well explained as any other optical phenomenon."

Meanwhile the advocates of the corpuscular theory were not idle; and in the next few years a succession of discoveries on their part, both theoretical and experimental, seemed likely to imperil the good position to which Young had advanced the rival hypothesis.

The first of these was a dynamical explanation of the refraction of the extraordinary ray in crystals, which was published in 1808 by Laplace. His method is an extension of that by which Maupertuis had accounted for the refraction of the ordinary ray, and which since Maupertuis' day had been so developed that it was now possible to apply it to problems of all degrees of complexity. Laplace assumes that the crystalline medium acts on the light-corpuscles of the extraordinary ray so as to modify their velocity, in a ratio which depends on the inclination of the extraordinary ray to the axis of the crystal: 50 that, in fact, the difference of the squares of the velocities of the ordinary and extraordinary rays is proportional to the square of the sine of the angle which the latter ray makes with the axis. The principle of least action then leads to a law of refraction identical with that found by Huygens' construction