Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/213

Rh flash of light. There is a nerve specially devoted to the purposes of vision which comes from the brain to the back of the eye, and there divides into fine filaments, which are woven together to a kind of screen called the retina. The retina can be excited in various ways so as to produce the consciousness of light: it may, as we have seen, be excited by the rude mechanical action of a blow imparted to the eye.

There is no spontaneous creation of light by the healthy eye. To excite vision the retina must be affected by something coming from without. What is that something? In some way or other luminous bodies have the power of affecting the retina but—how?

It was long supposed that from such bodies issued, with inconceivable rapidity, an inconceivably fine matter, which flew through space, passed through the pores supposed to exist in the humors of the eye, reached the retina behind, and, by their shock against the retina, aroused the sensation of light. This theory, which was supported by the greatest men, among others by Sir Isaac Newton, was found competent to explain a great number of the phenomena of light, but it was not found competent to explain all the phenomena. As the skill and knowledge of experimenters increased, large classes of facts were revealed which could only be explained by assuming that light was produced, not by a fine matter flying through space and hitting the retina, but by the shock of minute waves against the retina.

Dip your finger into a basin of water, and cause it to quiver rapidly to and fro. From the point of disturbance issue small ripples which are carried forward by the water, and which finally strike the basin. Here, in the vibrating finger, you have a source of agitation; in the water you have a vehicle through which the finger's motion is transmitted, and you have finally the side of the basin which receives the shock of the little waves.

In like manner, according to the wave-theory of light, you have a source of agitation in the vibrating atoms, or smallest particles, of the luminous body; you have a vehicle of transmission in a substance which is supposed to fill all space, and to be diffused through the humors of the eye; and, finally, you have the retina, which receives the successive shocks of the waves. These shocks are supposed to produce the sensation of light. We are here dealing, for the most part, with suppositions and assumptions merely. We have never seen the atoms of a luminous body, nor their motions. We have never seen the medium which transmits their motions, nor the waves of that medium. How, then, do we come to assume their existence?

Before such an idea could have taken any real root in the human mind, it must have been well disciplined and prepared by observations and calculations of ordinary wave-motion. It was necessary to know how both water-waves and sound-waves are formed and propagated. It was, above all things, necessary to know how waves, passing through the same medium, act upon each other. Thus disciplined,