28 J. RHEINBERG ON THE RESOLVING POWER OF THE MICROSCOPE. 



problems, there did not exist any proof which would satisfy a 

 physicist of the agency of diffracted light in producing images, 

 upon which (as a matter of fact, but not as an understood thing) 

 Abbe came by experiment. 



" I find my first publication of the new method of resolving 

 light was in December 1895, and shortly afterwards I had 

 a conversation with Lord Rayleigh about it, and explained to 

 him why a pair of lines or dots should be resolved by an aperture 

 insufficient to resolve a ruling equally spaced. In his earlier 

 papers he, like other writers on optics, had regarded them as 

 requiring the same aperture. 



" This conversation led Lord Rayleigh to look into the matter 

 under the more familiar hypothesis that light consists of rays, 

 and he published the result in his 1896 paper, which I under- 

 stand has been recently reprinted by the It. M.S. The result 

 comes out with ease by my method of treatment, and I told Lord 

 Rayleigh that it ought also to come out by the older methods of 

 treatment, if it were possible to take the phases sufficiently into 

 account. This Lord Rayleigh succeeded in doing, which I regard 

 as a great achievement." 



Journ. Quekett Microscopical Club, Ser. 2, Vol. IX., No. 54, April 1904. 



