Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/217

Rh Though the light-waves here prove their incompetence to ignite gun-cotton, they are able to burn up black paper; or, indeed, to explode the cotton when it is blackened. The white cotton does not absorb the light, and without absorption we have no heating. The blackened cotton absorbs, is heated, and explodes.

Instead of a solution of alum, we will employ for our next experiment a cell of pure water, through which the light passes without sensible absorption. At the focus is placed a test-tube also containing water, the full force of the light being concentrated upon it. The water is not sensibly warmed by the concentrated waves. We now remove the cell of water; no change is visible in the beam, but the water contained in the test-tube now boils.

The light-waves being thus proved ineffectual, and the full beam effectual, we may infer that it is the dark waves that do the work of heating. But we clinch our inference by employing our opaque iodine filter. Placing it on the path of the beam, the light is entirely stopped, but the water boils exactly as it did when the full beam fell upon it.

And now with regard to the melting of ice. On the surface of a flask containing a freezing; mixture we obtain a thick fur of hoar-frost. Sending the beam through a water-cell its luminous waves are concentrated upon the surface of the flask. Not a spicula of the frost is dissolved. We now remove the water-cell, and in a moment a patch of the frozen fur as large as half a crown is melted. Hence, inasmuch as the full beam produces this effect, and the luminous part of the beam does not produce it, we fix upon the dark portion the melting of the frost. As before, we clinch this inference by concentrating the dark waves alone upon the flask. The frost is dissipated exactly as it was by the full beam.

These effects are rendered strikingly visible by darkening with ink the freezing mixture within the flask. When the hoar-frost is removed, the blackness of the surface from which it had been melted comes out in strong contrast with the adjacent snowy whiteness. When the flask itself, instead of the freezing mixture, is blackened, the purely luminous waves, being absorbed by the glass, warm it; the glass reacts upon the frost, and melts it. Hence the wisdom of darkening, instead of the flask itself, the mixture within the flask.

This experiment proves to demonstration that it is the dark waves of the sun that melt the mountain snow and ice, and originate all the rivers derived from glaciers.

There are writers who seem to regard science as an aggregate of facts, and hence doubt its efficacy as an exercise of the reasoning powers. But all that I have here taught you is the result of reason, taking its stand, however, upon the sure basis of observation and experiment. And this is the spirit in which our further studies are to be pursued.