Flowers of the Sky. Richard Anthony Proctor

      We live in a mighty ocean whose waves are ever rushing hither and thither, always according to law, with velocity inconceivable, almost immeasurable. These waves lave the shore of that island of space which is our home, travelling to it from remotest regions, and making known to us all that we know of what lies outside our small abode. We call these waves, or rather their effects, by the name of Light. We recognise in light—

      "offspring of Heav'n's first-born

      And of th' Eternal co-eternal beam"—

      the antecedent of all else that exists in the universe; or, as Sir John Herschel said, "the superior in point of rank and conception to all other products or results of creative power in the physical world. It is light which alone can give, and does give us, the assurance of a uniform and all-pervading energy—a mechanism almost beyond conception, complex, minute, and powerful, by which that influence, or rather that movement, is propagated. Our evidence of the existence of gravitation fails us beyond the region of the double stars, or leaves at best only a presumption amounting to moral conviction in its favour. But the argument for a unity of design and action afforded by light stands unweakened by distance, and is co-extensive with the universe itself."

      What, then, is light? What is that mysterious movement of some essence pervading all space, whereby, from remotest depths, news is brought to us, after journeys lasting many years, though space is traversed at a rate exceeding more than ten million times the velocity of the swiftest express train?

      Light is in reality the result of undulations in what is called the ether of space, a perfectly transparent, almost perfectly elastic medium, occupying not only void space, but flowing as freely through the densest solids as the summer breeze flows through the forest trees. The waves of light cannot in this way pass through solid or liquid, or even aerial bodies, but either they are sooner or later brought to rest, or else they are more or less gradually deflected; just as the waves which traverse the ocean come to their end, or are deflected, when they meet the shore or shallows near the shore.

      All light, however, has its real origin, not in the ethereal ocean itself, but in the movements of the minute particles of which all forms of matter known to us are composed. A tiny atom, far too small to be perceived with a microscope, even though one should be made ten thousand times more powerful than any yet constructed, when set in rapid vibration, raises minute waves in the ethereal ocean, just as a small body, vibrating on the surface of a sheet of water, would generate waves there. And as the water-waves would travel radially away from the place of their birth, so do the light-waves generated by the vibrations of one of the atoms composing a luminous body radiate forth in all directions through the ethereal ocean until, encountering some obstacle, they are sent (reduced in size) in a new direction.

      In some luminous bodies there are atoms vibrating in many different periods (all very small) so as to cause light-waves of many different kinds to proceed from the body. In other cases the atoms all vibrate at one rate, or at two or three or some definite number of rates, so that only light-waves of certain kinds proceed from the body. But in all cases these light-waves only cause us to see the body when they flow in through the pupil of the eye, and falling upon the retina (or the choroid membrane, or whatever part of the eye it may be which finally receives the waves), convey to the optic nerve, and thence to the brain, the information that such and such a body, so coloured, so shaped, so moving, exists towards that direction from which the light-waves seem to come. The body so seen, as we call it, may be the original source of light, or may be a body on which light has been reflected to us.

      It is in this way that we receive information from light-waves. It will be conceived how minute they must be, how perfectly they must retain their separate character, multitudinous though they are, in traversing the ether (even when that ether is clogged by the gross matter of our ordinary air), if we remember how through the tiny eye-pupil we often receive light-waves telling us of all the details, all the varieties of colour and brightness, all the movements in a rich landscape.

      Even more startling are the thoughts suggested by a view of the starlit heavens. From hundreds of suns at once the light-waves which have traversed varying but all enormous distances pour in upon the small circle of the eye-pupil, waves of many kinds coming in together from each sun. The waves which thus reach the eye from one bright star have been but a few years upon their journey; all that time they have been traversing an ocean swept in every part by untold millions of other waves, and yet they arrive as perfect in order and regularity as rollers which have traversed a wide sea pour in upon a level shore. From another star, as bright as the first, they have been years in travelling; from some among the fainter stars, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Yet still they flow on, each order of waves in perfect uniformity as when they first left their parent sun.