Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/235

 of light passing through the prism, which, according to Newton, is the indispensable condition requisite for the production of a pure spectrum, as an impure and complicated mode of illustrating the phenomenon. The elementary fact is, according to Goethe, obtained when we operate with a wide rectangle the edges only of which are colored, while the center remains white. His experiments with the parchment had made him acquainted with the passage of yellow into red as he multiplied his layers; but how this passage occurs in the spectrum he does not explain. That, however, his hazy surfaces—his virtual turbid media—produced, in some way or other, the observed passage and intensification, Goethe held as firmly, and enunciated as confidently, as if his analysis of the phenomena had been complete.

The fact is, that between double images and turbid media there is no kinship whatever. Turbidity is due to the diffusion, in a transparent medium, of minute particles having a refractive index different from that of the medium. But the act of reflection which produced the penumbral surfaces, whose aid Goethe invoked, did not charge them with such discrete particles. On various former occasions I have tried to set forth the principles on which the chromatic action of turbid media depends. When such media are to be seen blue, the light scattered by the diffused particles, and that only, ought to reach the eye. This feeble light may be compared to a faint whisper which is easily rendered inaudible by a louder noise. The scattered light of the particles is accordingly overpowered, when a stronger light comes, not from the particles, but from a bright surface behind them. Here the light reaches the eye, minus that scattered by the particles. It is therefore the complementary light, or yellow. Both effects are immediately deducible from the principles of the undulatory theory. As a stone in water throws back a larger fraction of a ripple than of a larger wave, so do the excessively minute particles which produce the turbidity scatter more copiously the small waves of the spectrum than the large ones. Light scattered by such particles will therefore always contain a preponderance of the waves which produce the sensation of blue. During its transmission through the turbid medium the white light is more and more robbed of its blue constituents, the transmitted light which reaches the eye being therefore complementary to the blue.

Some of you are, no doubt, aware that it is possible to take matter in the gaseous condition, when its smallest parts are molecules, incapable of being either seen themselves or of scattering any sensible portion of light which impinges on them; that it is possible to shake these molecules asunder by special light-waves, so that their liberated constituents shall coalesce anew and form, not molecules, but particles; that it is possible to cause these particles to grow, from a size bordering on the atomic, to a size which enables them to copiously scatter light. Some of you are aware that in the early stages of their growth, when they are still beyond the grasp of the microscope, such particles,