Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/55

Rh retina. There does not appear to be in this or other insects a tightly stretched membrane which, like the membrane of our ear-drum, is fitted to take up bodily air-waves and vibrate responsively to them. But it is evidently adapted to receive and concentrate some kind of vibration or motion or tremor.

What kind of motion can this be? What kind of perception does this curious organ supply? To answer these questions we must travel beyond the strict limits of scientific induction and enter the fairy-land of scientific imagination. We may wander here in safety, provided we always remember where we are, and keep a true course guided by the compass-needle of demonstrable facts.

I have said that the cornea-like membrane of the insect's ear-bag does not appear capable of responding to bodily air-waves. This adjective is important, because there are vibratory movements of matter that are not bodily but molecular. An analogy may help to render this distinction intelligible. I may take a long string of beads and shake it into wave-like movements, the waves being formed by the movements of the whole string. We may now conceive another kind of movement or vibration by supposing one bead to receive a blow pushing it forward, this push to be communicated to the next, then to the third, and so on, producing a minute running tremor passing from end to end. This kind of action may be rendered visible by laying a number of billiard-balls or marbles in line and bowling an outside ball against the end one of the row. The impulse will be rapidly and invisibly transmitted all along the line, and the outer ball will respond by starting forward.

Heat, light, and electricity, are mysterious internal movements of what we call matter (some say "ether," which is but a name for imaginary matter). These internal movements are as invisible as those of the intermediate billiard-balls; but if there be a line of molecules acting thus, and the terminal one strikes an organ of sense fitted to receive its motion, some sort of perception may follow. When such movements of certain frequency and amplitude strike our organs of vision, the sensation of light is produced. When others of greater amplitude and smaller frequency strike the terminal outspread of our common sensory nerves, the sensation of heat results. The difference between the frequency and amplitude of the heat-waves and the light-waves is but small, or, strictly speaking, there is no actual line of separation lying between them; they run directly into each other. When a piece of metal is gradually heated, it is first "black-hot"; this is while the waves or molecular tremblings are of a certain amplitude and frequency; as the frequency increases, and amplitude diminishes (or, to borrow from musical terms, as the pitch rises), the metal becomes dull red-hot; greater rapidity, cherry-red; greater still, bright-red; then yellow-hot and white-hot: the luminosity growing as the rapidity of molecular vibration increases.