Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/226

214 of light and radiant heat we may expect to find something quite different from the sense of vision or of warmth; and he expresses himself with the aid of the same simile of sound employed by Draper over two hundred years later. The writings of Boyle on the mechanical production of heat contain illustrations (like that of the hammer driving the nail, which grows hot in proportion as its bodily motion is arrested) which show a singularly complete apprehension of views we are apt to think we have made our own; and it seems to me that any one who consults the originals will admit that, though its full consequences have not been wrought out till our own time, yet the fundamental idea of heat as a mode of motion is so far from being a modern one, that it was announced in varying forms by Newton's immediate predecessors, by Descartes, by Bacon, by Hobbes, and in particular by Boyle, while Hooke and Huygens merely continue their work, as at first does Newton himself.

If, however, Newton found the doctrine of vibrations already, so to speak, "in the air," we must, while recognizing that in the history of thought the new always has its root in the old, and that it is not given even to a Newton to create an absolutely new light, still admit that the full dawn of our subject properly begins with him, and admit, too, that it is a bright one, when we read in the "Optics" such passages as these: "Do not all fixed bodies, when heated beyond a certain degree, emit light and shine, and is not this emission performed by the vibrating motions of their parts?" And again: "Do not several sorts of rays make vibrations of several bignesses?" And still again: "Is not the heat conveyed by the vibrations of a much subtler medium than air?"

Here is the undulatory theory; here is the connection of the ethereal vibrations with those of the material solid; here is "heat as a mode of motion"; here is the identity of radiant heat and light; here is the idea of wave-lengths. What a step forward this first one is! And the second?—the second is, as we now know, backward. The second is the rejection of this, and the adoption of the corpuscular hypothesis, with which alone the name of Newton (a father of the undulatory theory) is, in the minds of most, associated to-day.

Do not let us forget, however, that it was on the balancing of arguments from the facts then known that he decided, and that perhaps it was rather an evidence of his superiority to Huygens, that apprehending before the latter, and equally clearly, the undulatory theory, he recognized also more clearly that this theory, as then understood, failed utterly to account for several of the most important phenomena. With an equally judicial mind, Huygens would perhaps have decided so too, in the face of difficulties, all of which have not been cleared up even to-day.