Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/470

464 was detected to be no other, than that light consists of rays differently refrangible, which, without any respect to a difference in their incidence, were according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.

When I understood this, I left off my aforesaid glass works, for I saw, that the perfection of telescopes was hitherto limited, not so much for want of glasses truly figured according to the prescriptions of optic authors, (which all men have hitherto imagined,) as because that light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays. So that, were a glass so exactly figured, as to collect any one sort of rays into one point, it could not collect those also into the same point, which having the same incidence upon the same medium are apt to suffer a different refraction. Nay, I wondered, that seeing the difference of refrangibility was so great, as I found it, telescopes should arrive to that perfection they are now at. For measuring the refractions in one of my prisms, I found that supposing the common sine of incidence upon one of its planes was 44 parts, the sine of refraction of the utmost rays on the red end of the colours, made out of the glass into the air, would be 68 parts, and the sine of refraction of the utmost rays on the other end 69 parts: so that the difference is about a 24th or 25th part of the whole refraction; and consequently, the object glass of any telescope cannot collect all the rays which come from one point of an object, so as to make them convene at its focus in less room than in a circular space, whose diameter is the 50th part of the diameter of its aperture; which is an irregularity, some hundreds of times greater than a circularly figured lens, of so small a section as the object glasses of long telescopes are, would cause by the unfitness of its figure, were light uniform.

This made me take reflections into consideration, and finding them regular, so that the angle of reflection of all sorts of rays was equal to their angle of incidence; I understood that by their mediation optic instruments might be brought to any degree of perfection imaginable, provided a reflecting substance could be found, which would polish as finely as glass, and reflect as much light as glass transmits, and the art of communicating to it a parabolic figure be also attained. But there seemed very great difficulties, and I have almost thought them insuperable, when I further considered, that every irregularity in a reflecting superficies makes the rays stay five or six times more out of their due course, than the like irregularities in a refracting one: so that a much greater curiosity would be here requisite, than in figuring glasses for refraction.

Amidst these thoughts I was forced from Cambridge by the intervening plague, and it was more then two years before I proceeded further. But then having thought on a tender way of polishing,