Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/209

Rh by on philosophical grounds, and then rejected, since he did not at that time possess the key which alone could have enabled him to properly interpret his experiments.

It is well to summarize the capital discoveries in this field made by, more particularly because his claims as a discoverer seem to have been strangely overlooked by historians of the development of physical science. He, before any other investigator, showed that radiant heat is refracted according to the laws governing the refraction of light by transparent media; that a portion of the radiation from the sun is incapable of exciting the sensation of vision, and that this portion is the less refrangible; that the different colors of the spectrum possess very unequal heating powers, which are not proportional to their luminosity; that substances differ very greatly in their power of transmitting radiant heat, and that this power does not depend solely upon their color; and that the property of diffusing heat is possessed to a varying degree by