APPENDIX.
How variously do philosophers explain the nature of light! Some have called it the traction of lines in radial action. That a ray of light is a radius, having two extremities, different from each other, one turned towards the sun, and one coming in contact with the planets; and that that light is a splitting, rending action: that it is the life of ether. Some have said (strangely) that the sun is an undulating sea of flame, and that combustions or electrical processes of light, appearing to us as light, occur in its atmosphere, and that the velocity of rotation hurls about the light particles, which are again, by an unknown route and unknown means, brought back to the sun.
Some consider that the sun appears to have only the density of water, being four times less dense than the earth, and, therefore, nearly in the condition of water; and that it gives out light merely because it is water; for as such it is in eternal motion, and is moved by the planets. That at every point of the sun, opposite to which a planet stands, there is flow; there illumination is stronger. That there must be several seas of light upon the sun opposite to the planets, and that there is nowhere a perfectly quiescent point in the sun. These philosophers remind us the ebb and flow of the sea give out light; and that, as they say, the sun is a body trembling through its mass, and thereupon phosphorescent.
We trust we shall not fatigue by some further observations,—for instance, colour or decomposition of light fairly claim a few words. Light cannot enter unchanged into mutual operation with matter. The tension of ether changes itself in matter, and this change is a debilitation of the tension of ether; and, lastly, its complete cessation. There can, therefore, be no absolutely transparent matter, the ether only being the absolutely transparent. The denser a material is, by so much the more will it be capable of suppressing in itself the tension of light. This suppression or expiration of the tension of light in bodies has received the name of absorption. This absorption is not a mechanical adherence of the particles of light in the pores of bodies—there are no
