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104 was secured by proper adjustments. The secondary disturbances were got rid of by careful screening. But one serious difficulty was encountered at the very outset, in the failure of the polariser to produce complete polarisation. In my first experiments on polarisation (the receiver then used not having been very sensitive), polarisers made of wire gratings were found effective. But in my later experiments with still more sensitive receivers, I found that, owing probably to the want of strict parallelism of the wires and the difficulty of exactly crossing the analyser and polariser, it was impossible to produce total extinction of the field. I then made a polariser and analyser by cutting parallel slits out of two square pieces of thick copper. When the square pieces were adjusted with coincident edges, the analyser and polariser were either exactly parallel or exactly crossed. This improvement enabled me to carry out successfully some of the more delicate experiments. In the present course of investigation the sensitiveness of the receiver had to be raised to a still higher degree, and it was found that the polariser hitherto found efficient failed to produce complete polarisation, so that even when the polariser and the analyser were exactly crossed the non-polarised portion of radiation was of sufficient intensity to produce strong action on the receiver.

In the paper "On the Selective Conductivity exhibited by some Polarising Substances" I described a book-form of polariser, when an ordinary book was shown to produce polarisation of the transmitted beam, the vibrations parallel to the pages being absorbed, and those at right angles transmitted in a polarised condition. The advantage of this form pf polariser was that