Page:A history of the theories of aether and electricity. Whittacker E.T. (1910).pdf/45

 front can be found. It is obvious that the envelope of these secondary waves, which constitutes the final wave-front, will be a plane BN, which will be inclined to AB at the same angle as AC. This gives the law of reflexion.

The law of refraction is established by similar reasoning, on the supposition that the velocity of light depends on the medium in which it is propagated. Since a ray which passes from air to glass is bent inwards towards the normal, it may be inferred that light travels more slowly in glass than in air.

Huygens offered a physical explanation of the variation in velocity of light from one medium to another, by supposing that transparent bodies consist of hard particles which interact with the aethereal matter, modifying its elasticity. The opacity of metals he explained by an extension of the same idea, supposing that some of the particles of metals are hard (these account for reflexion) and the rest soft: the latter destroy the luminous motion by damping it.

The second half of the Théorie de la lumière is concerned with a phenomenon which had been discovered a few years previously by a Danish philosopher, Erasmus Bartholin (b. 1625, d. 1698). A sailor had brought from Iceland to Copenhagen a number of beautiful crystals which he had collected in the Bay of Röerford. Bartholin, into whose hands they passed, noticed that any small object viewed through one of these crystals appeared double, and found the immediate cause of this in the fact that a ray of light entering the crystal gave rise in general to two refracted rays. One of these rays was subject to the ordinary law of refraction, while the other, which was called the extraordinary ray, obeyed a different law, which Bartholin did not succeed in determining.

The matter had arrived at this stage when it was taken up by Huygens. Since in his conception each ray of light corresponds to the propagation of a wave-front, the two rays in Iceland spar must correspond to two different wave-fronts propagated