Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/664

644 The Challenger has dredged from the bottom of the ocean fishes which live habitually at great depths, and whose enormous eyes tell of the correspondingly faint light which must have descended to them through the seemingly transparent water. It will not be as futile a speculation as it may at first seem, to put ourselves in imagination in the condition of creatures under the sea, and ask what the sun may appear to be to them; for, if the fish who had never risen above the ocean-floor were an intelligent being, might he not plausibly reason that the dim greenish light of his heaven—which is all he has ever known—was the full splendor of the sun shining through a medium which all his experience shows is transparent?

We ourselves are, in very fact, living at the floor of a great aërial sea, whose billows roll hundreds of miles above our heads. Is it not at any rate conceivable that we may have been led into a like fallacy from judging only by what we see at the bottom? May we not, that is, have been led into the fallacy of assuming that the intervening medium above us is colorless because the light which comes through it is so?

I freely admit that all men, educated or ignorant, appear to have the evidence of their senses that the air is colorless, and that pure sunlight is white, so that if I venture to ask you to listen to considerations which have lately been brought forward to show that it is the sun which is blue, and the air really acts like an orange veil or like a sieve which picks out the blue and leaves the white, I do so in the confidence that I may appeal to you on other grounds than those I could submit to the primitive man who has his senses alone to trust to; for the educated intelligence possesses those senses equally, and in addition the ability to interpret them by the light of reason, and before this audience it is to that interpretation that I address myself.

Permit me a material illustration. You see through this glass, which may typify the intervening medium of air or water, a circle of white light, which may represent the enfeebled disk of the sun when so viewed. Is this intervening glass colored or not? It seems nearly colorless; but have we any right to conclude that it is so because it seems so? Are we not taking it for granted that the original light which we see through it is white, and that the glass is colorless, because the light seems unaltered; and is not an appeal to be made here from sense to reason, which, in the educated observer, recalls that white light is made of various colors, and that whether the original light is really white and the glass transparent, or the glass really colored and so making the white, is to be decided only by experiment, by taking away the possibly deceptive medium? I can take away this glass, which was not colorless, but of a deep orange, and you see that the original light was not white, but intensely blue. If we could take the atmosphere away between us and the sun, how can we say that the same result might not follow? To make the meaning of our