ACADEMY OF SCIENCES] BIOGRAPHY 5 



through water vapor. These researches were published, some of them only in abstract, between 

 the years 1886 and 1905. The references to them can be found in the bibliography at the end of 

 this memoir. 



Of all these physical researches the most noteworthy is that of the relative motion of the 

 earth and the ether. Fizeau had already shown that the ether is entirely unaffected by the 

 motion of the matter which it permeates. To repeat Fizeau 's experiment was the first task in 

 which Michelson and Morley cooperated, and this was foUowed by another experiment to detect 

 any difference in the velocity of fight owing to the motion of the apparatus toward or away from 

 waves of light in the ether. The detads of these investigations can not be considered here, but 

 Morley in his personal memoranda gives a clear statement as to his share in them. I now quote 

 Morley, almost but not quite literally. He speaks in the first person, which I venture to change 

 to the third. Beyond this alteration only a few words have been changed from the wording in 

 the original statements, and then oidy for the sake of clearness. 



When Michelson was ready to repeat Fizeau's experiment, certain conveniences were 

 avadable in Morley's laboratory, and he was cordially invited to make use of them. Morley had 

 no assistant, and so, naturally, it fell to him to see that Michelson had what was needful, and so 

 became pretty familiar with Michelson's plans. His work was interrupted by illness and 

 absence, and an erroneous diagnosis led him to turn over to Morley an appropriation for the 

 experiment with a request to him to conclude it. Morley had got the apparatus ready for the 

 final observations when Michelson wrote that he should return in a short time. Morley, there- 

 fore, ceased work, and wrote, surrendering the conduct of the experiment to Michelson, and the 

 latter accordingly proposed that it should be a joint experiment. 



When Michelson was ready to make a decisive experiment on the velocity of light parallel 

 to and across the line of drift through the luminiferous ether, the best avadable place for the 

 apparatus was again found to be Morley's laboratory, and this experiment also was made a joint 

 affair. The result was negative. No difference was found. 



In 1900, as Morley was going to a meeting of the Congress of Physics in Paris, Lord Kelvin 

 saw him and asked him with much earnestness if there was any possibility of escape from the 

 unexpected result of the experiment mentioned above. The conversation showed that Lord 

 Kelvin was anxious to know whether the result would be in any degree altered by change of the 

 sandstone slab of that experiment for other materials. After subsequent interviews with Kelvin, 

 Morley resolved to repeat the experiment, and secured the cooperation of Prof. Dayton C. Miller. 

 With the aid of a grant from the Bache fund, an apparatus of pine was set up at the Case School 

 of Apphed Science. After its completion there was not time enough to finish the observations 

 during the summer vacation. When another summer vacation came it was found that the 

 apparatus had been subjected to such heat and dryness during the winter that its instabdity 

 prevented observations. Accordingly a third apparatus was built of structural steel, in which 

 the optical path could be limited either by the steel of the framework, or by pine distance rods 

 determining the distance of the mirror holders. 



With this apparatus it was found that if there were any portion of the results expected in 

 the previous experiment it was not more than one one-hundredth of 1 per cent. Here again 

 the result was practically negative. 



In the later years of his life, in his private laboratory at West Hartford, Morley made about 

 70 analyses of igneous rocks that were collected by J. P. Iddings in the Malay Archipelago. 

 It is hardly necessary to say that these difficult and complicated analyses were made with the 

 greatest thoroughness, and that none better can be foimd in the whole literature of petrology. 

 Nineteen of these analyses, of rocks from Java and Celebes, were published in a joint paper by 

 Iddings and Morley. This was Morley's last contribution to chemistry. Morley was not a 

 voluminous writer; his published bibliography contains only 55 titles. But a single great 

 research may outweigh many small ones. 



Morley was the recipient of many honors, among them three medals, namely, the Davy 

 medal of the Royal Society, the Elliot Cresson medal of the Franklin Institute, and the Wdlard 

 Gibbs medal of the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society. Ho had the degree of 

 doctor of laws from Williams College, Western Reserve, Lafayette, and Pittsburgh; of doctor of 



