Page:Experimental researches in chemistry and.djvu/453

438 its result with that of the light which had passed through the gold.

The gold-leaf plates, deprived of green colour by heating in oil, were found with the glass in such good annealed condition, as not to affect the ray; but when they were moved, until the oblique colourless gold came into the course of the ray, it was depolarized; a red image appeared; direct rotation of the analyser reduced this a little in intensity and then changed the colour to blue. The reduction was not much, and both in that and the first appearance of the red image, there is a difference between the heated and the unheated gold: probahly the green tint of the latter, which would tend to extinguish the red and produce a minimum, may be sufficient to account for the effect. Gold which had been re-greened by agate pressure acted in like manner on the polarized ray, but the experiments were imperfect.

A glass plate having gold-leaf on one part of it, had a second glass plate put over it and gummed at the edges. In the sulphide of carbon, therefore, it represented in one part a plate of air, and in another a compound plate of air and gold; both acted in the same direction, but the air and gold much more than the air. Gold on glass in this medium, or gold in air, or glass in air, all gave results in the same direction, i. e. required direct rotation of the analyser to compensate for them.

I proceeded to examine the other forms of gold; and Erst, the deposits on glass obtained by electric deflagration. These affected the ray of polarized light exactly in the manner of gold-leaf, and that even at the distant parts of the deposit. It was most striking to contrast the thinnest and faintest portion of such a film with the neighbouring parts of the glass from which it had been wiped off It must be remembered that such a preparation is a layer of separate particles; that these particles are not like those of starch or of crystals, for they have no action whilst in a plane perpendicular to the polarized ray; nor have they a better action for being-in a thick layer, as in the central parts of the deposit. The particles seem to form the equivalent of a continuous plate of transparent substance; and as in such a plate it is the two surfaces which act, so there appears to be the equivalent of these two surfaces