Page:A history of the theories of aether and electricity. Whittacker E.T. (1910).pdf/41

 Newton devoted considerable attention to the colours of thin. plates, and determined the empirical laws of the phenomena with great accuracy. In order to explain them, he supposed that "every ray of light, in its passage through any refracting surface, is put into a certain transient constitution or state, which, in the progress of the ray, returns at equal intervals, and disposes the ray, at every return, to be easily transmitted through the next refracting surface, and, between the returns, to be easily reflected by it." The interval between two consecutive dispositions to easy transmission, or "length of fit," he supposed to depend on the colour, being greatest for red light and least for violet. If then a ray of homogeneous light falls on a thin plate, its fortunes as regards transmission and reflexion at the two surfaces will depend on the relation which the length of fit bears to the thickness of the plate; and on this basis he built up a theory of the colours of thin plates. It is evident that Newton's "length of fit" corresponds in some measure to the quantity which in the undulatory theory is called the wave-length of the light; but the suppositions of easy transmission and reflexion were soon found inadequate to explain all Newton's experimental results, at least without making other and more complicated additional assumptions.

At the time of the publication of Hooke's Micrographia, and Newton's theory of colours, it was not known whether light is propagated instantaneously or not. An attempt to settle the question experimentally had been made many years previously by Galileo, who had stationed two men with lanterns at a considerable distance from each other, one of them was directed to observe when the other uncovered his light, and exhibit his own the moment he perceived it. But the interval of time required by the light for its journey was too small to be perceived in this way; and the discovery was