29+ THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



LIGHT AND LIFE. 



By FERNAND PAPILLON. 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY A. R. MACDONOUdH, ESQ. 



THE organized being that we observe on the surface of the globe 

 does not subsist solely by the nourishment absorbed, sometimes 

 in the form of aliment, sometimes in that of atmospheric air ; it needs 

 besides, heat, electricity, and light, which are like a secret and life- 

 giving spring for 'the world. Its organs are subject to the twofold in- 

 fluence of an inner medium, represented by the humors moistening its 

 tissues, and of an outer medium, composed of all those subtle and fluid 

 agents with which space is filled. This close interdependence of beings 

 and of the media in which they are immersed, too plain to have quite es- 

 caped notice, yet too complex for analysis by science in its infancy, has 

 been brought in our day under piercing and methodical investigation, 

 yielding results of remarkable interest. Light especially takes a part 

 in this combination deserving deep study. Whether organic existence 

 in its simplest expression jaid its lowest degree be considered, or 

 whether we regard it in its highest functions, the influence of light upon 

 it strikes us in the most strange and unlooked-for relations. Lovely 

 forms and vivid colors, the hidden harmonies of life as well as itS 

 dazzling brightness and bloom, alike claim mysterious connection with 

 that golden mist diffused by the sun over the world. 



From this point of view, modern science finds reason in the simple 

 worship paid by primitive man. It helps us to understand the divine 

 honors given to the star of day among the earliest civilized nations, 

 and the pathetic terror those child-like races suffered when, at evening, 

 they saw the crimson globe, that was the source for them of all power 

 and all splendor, slowly disappear in the horizon. That pious idolatry, 

 far from being a mere utterance of gratitude for the wealth of fertility 

 scattered by the sun over earth, was a homage, too, to the comforting 

 source of brightness and joy, revealing the natural affinity between 

 man and light. The Vedas, the Orphic hymns, and other remains of 

 the earliest religions, are full of this feeling, which appears again in 

 many poets and philosophers of antiquity, Lucretius and Pliny among 

 others. Dante, invoking so often "the divine and piercing. light," 

 crowns his poem by a hymn which more than any thing else is a sym- 

 bolic description of the supreme brightness. On the other hand, 

 laborers, gardeners, physicians, unite in bearing witness to the bene- 

 ficial effects of light. Naturalists and philosophers, too, in all ages, 

 impressed with the power of the sun, have described its manifold effects. 

 Alexander Humboldt, following Goethe and Lavoisier, often notices its 

 its various influences. Yet it was not until the middle of the eighteenth 



