Page:Young - Outlines of experiments and inquiries respecting sound and light (1800).djvu/27

X. Of the Analogy between Light and Sound.

Ever since the publication of Sir Isaac Newton's incomparable writings, his doctrines of the emanation of particles of light from lucid substances, and of the formal pre-existence of coloured rays in white light, have been almost universally admitted in this country, and but little opposed in others. Leonard Euler indeed, in several of his works, has advanced some powerful objections against them, but not sufficiently powerful to justify the dogmatical reprobation with which he treats them; and he has left that system of an ethereal vibration, which after Huygens and some others he adopted, equally liable to be attacked on many weak sides. Without pretending to decide positively on the controversy, it is conceived that some considerations may be brought forwards, which may tend to diminish the weight of objections to a theory similar to the Huygenian. There are also one or two difficulties in the Newtonian system, which have been little observed. The first is, the uniform velocity with which light is supposed to be projected from all luminous bodies, in consequence of heat, or otherwise. How happens it that, whether the projecting force is the slightest transmission of electricity, the friction of two pebbles, the lowest degree of visible ignition, the white heat of a wind furnace, or the intense heat of the sun itself, these wonderful corpuscles are always propelled with one uniform velocity? For, if they differed in velocity, that difference ought to produce a different refraction. But a still more insuperable difficulty seems to occur, in the partial reflection from every refracting surface. Why, of the same kind of rays, in every circumstance precisely similar, some should always be reflected,