Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/215

Rh heat-waves, and allow the light-waves alone to pass. These may be concentrated by suitable lenses and sent into water without sensibly warming it. Let the light-waves now be withdrawn, and the larger heat-waves concentrated in the same manner; they may be caused to boil the water almost instantaneously.

This is the point to which I wished to lead you, and which without due preparation could not be understood. You now perceive the important part played by these large darkness-waves, if I may use the term, in the work of evaporation. When they plunge into seas, lakes, and rivers, they are intercepted close to the surface, and they heat the water at the surface, thus causing it to evaporate; the light-waves at the same time entering to great depths without sensibly heating the water through which they pass. Not only, therefore, is it the sun's fire which produces evaporation, but a particular constituent of that fire, the existence of which you probably were not aware of.

Further, it is these self-same lightless waves which, falling upon the glaciers of the Alps, melt the ice and produce all the rivers flowing from the glaciers; for I shall prove to you presently that the light-waves, even when concentrated to the uttermost, are unable to melt the most delicate hoar-frost; much less would they be able to produce the copious liquefaction observed upon the glaciers.

These large lightless waves of the sun, as well as the heat-waves issuing from non-luminous hot bodies, are frequently called obscure or invisible heat.

We have here an example of the manner in which phenomena, apparently remote, are connected together in this wonderful system of things that we call Nature. You cannot study a snow-flake profoundly without being led back by it step by step to the constitution of the sun. It is thus throughout Nature. All its parts are interdependent, and the study of any one part completely would really involve the study of all.

Heat issuing from any source not visibly red cannot be concentrated so as to produce the intense effects just referred to. To produce these it is necessary to employ the obscure heat of a body raised to the high est possible state of incandescence. The sun is such a body, and its dark heat is therefore suitable for experiments of this nature. But in the atmosphere of London, and for experiments such as ours, the heat-waves emitted by coke, raised to intense whiteness by a current of electricity, are much more manageable than the sun's waves. The electric light has also the advantage that its dark radiation embraces a larger proportion of the total radiation than the dark heat of the sun. In fact, the force or energy, if I may use the term, of the dark waves of the electric light is fully seven times that of its light-waves. The electric light, therefore, shall be employed in our experimental demonstrations.

From this source a powerful beam is sent through the room, revealing its track by the motes floating in the air of the room; for, were