11 



ABSINTHINE. 



ABSORPTION OF LIGHT. 



industry in either case, for it is equally unproductive consumption, 

 It has been a notion amongst a class of political economist*, which is 

 fast yielding to sounder notions, that all expenditure is unproductive 

 unless it be incurred directly in the aid of further production. The 

 truth is becoming apparent, that it is impossible to limit productive 

 expenditure by such narrow laws to say that the man who spends, 

 100/. iu clothes is an unproductive consumer, whilst the tailop who 

 spends 50?. in cloth and labour for the clothes is a productive 

 OMumer. The one could not exist without the other. The one has 

 enabled the other to make a profit upon the clothes, and part of that 

 profit may become accumulation as certainly as if the buyer of clothes 

 had been satisfied with half his wardrobe [CAPITAL] ; and this shows 

 the fallacy that lies at the bottom of the absentee argument. The 

 absentee withdraws the local profit of those who have a natural claim 

 to supply his wants. It may be true, that the foreigner requires some 

 additional goods from England in consequence of the domiciliation oi 

 the English absentee ; but does he require as large an amount oi 

 English goods as the total sum which the Englishman expends .' 

 Unquestionably not. There are large differences between the exchanges 

 of commerce and the smaller exchanges of domestic life. The profit ol 

 the foreign retailers, of the foreign domestic servants, of the foreign 

 landlord of the absentee's house, remain at any rate to the foreign 

 country, and are so much abstracted from the absentee's country. By 

 attracting the profit of these smaller transactions, the surplus tint 

 becomes accumulation remains in the shape of new capital to the 

 foreign country. New capital in a country is created by the slow 

 aggregation of minute individual profit. Profit is like the nitrogenous 

 substance* in the food of men. Individuals may exist feebly and 

 miserably without profit from their labour that is, their labour may 

 replace what they consume, and leave no surplus as individuals may 

 drag on existence upon the innutritious root which imperfectly 

 replaces then- ordinary exhaustion, and leaves nothing for development 

 or extraordinary exertion. But the wealth of nations cannot be 

 sustained without surplus produce without profit ; as the health of 

 communities cannot be sustained without the food which builds up 

 the body as well as keeps alive the animal heat. Kent U really profit 

 under another name. It is, in most cases, the largest portion of the 

 surplus produce of the soil. It is that surplus which constitutes a 

 natural fund for social improvement. The absentee who withdraws 

 that fund from its local appropriation to make it the source of new 

 profit to a foreign country, even if it be only the profit of supplying 

 his domestic necessities and not the profit of commercial exchange, to 

 a certain extent must take away what he ought to contribute to the 

 accumulation of his own district and his own country. 



(The arguments which deny the injurious effects of absenteeism, 

 merely regarded a* a question of political economy, may be seen in 

 Mr. M'Culloch's evidence before the Select Committee on the ' State of 

 Ireland, 1825, Fourth Report,' and hi* evidence before the Committee 

 on the ' State of the Poor in Ireland, 1 830.' The contrary argument 

 may be found in ' Lectures on Political Economy,' by J. A. Lawson, 

 LL.B., Lecture V. 1843.) 



ABSINTHINE (Formula, C M H t , 10 ), the bitter principle of the 

 Ariemitia absinthium. To prepare it, the dried leaves of wormwood 

 are extracted with alcohol of 80 per cent., the extract evaporated to a 

 syrupy consistence and treated with ether ; the supernatant ethereal 

 layer must be decanted, and the treatment of the residue with ether 

 repeated until the ethereal extract no longer tastes bitter. This 

 ethereal solution, evaporated on the water bath, leaves a residue com- 

 puted of absintbine and a resinous body, which latter may be dissolved 

 >nt by very dilute ammonia. The residual absinthine must be digested 

 with dilute hydrochloric acid, washed with water, and then dissolved 

 in alcohol ; to the alcoholic solution acetate of lead must be added 

 until the liquid becomes milky. After filtration, the excess of lead 

 must be removed by sulphuretted hydrogen, and the alcoholic solution, 

 slightly diluted with water, allowed to evaporate spontaneously in a 

 warm place. Yellow resinous drops of absinthine gradually separate, 

 and these finally solidify to a confusedly crystalline mass. 



Absinthine has a slight odour of wormwood, and an exceedingly 

 bitter taste. It is very slightly soluble in water, more so in ether, and 

 Try soluble in alcohol, and also in concentrated acetic acid. Ammonia 

 dissolves it in very small quantity only, but potash somewhat more 

 freely. It possesses a decidedly acid reaction. 



ABSOLUTION, a religious ceremony in use in different Christian 

 communities, by which the priest declares an individual, on repentance 

 and submission to the requisite penance, to be absolved either from 

 his sin, or from the ecclesiastical punishment or deprivation to which 

 it had rendered him liable. It is contended by many theological 

 writers, th^t down to the twelfth century the pnest in this act only 

 used the words " May God, or may Christ, absolve thee ; " thus refrain- 

 ing from claiming any authority to remit the sin himself. Since then, 

 however, the formula used in the Roman Catholic church has been 

 ff tr iiff.r.alin tuiii (I absolve thee from thy sins), accom- 



panied with the nign of the cross. The Council of Trent has expressly 

 condemn**! the doctrine that the priest has not power of himself to 

 absolve from the guilt of sin. (Session xiv. Canon 4.) The Church nf 

 England employs in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, words 

 imrly the same with those employed in the Roman Catholic com- 

 munion. " I absolve thee from all thy in." It is, however, main 



tained by the highest authorities that the absolution thus bestowed is 

 only declaratory, while that pronounced by tha Roman Catholic priest 

 is professed to be absolute, and to proceed solely from himself. Hooker, 

 ' Ecclesiastical Polity,' B. VI. 12 ; who winds up hia comparison of the 

 doctrine of his own church with that of the Church of Rome, bv 

 saying, " Wherefore' the further we wade, the better we see it still 

 appear, that the priest doth never in absolution, no not so much as by- 

 way of service and ministry, really either forgive the act, take away 

 the uncleanness, or remove the punishment of sin : but if the party 

 penitent come contrite, he hath by their own grant absolution before 

 absolution ; if not contrite, although the priest should ten thousand 

 times absolve him, all were in vain." (Ibid. B. VI. 13.) In the Greek 

 church the formula is merely declaratory ; that is to say, it. is of the 

 nature of a prayer to heaven that the sins of the penitent person may 

 not be visited with their due punishment. It is so also in the Protest - 

 ant Church of Scotland ; and there the term absolution is couunonly 

 used to denote simply the declaration of the Kirk-Session or other 

 judicatory, expressed by the mouth of its president, that the party is 

 released from the ecclesiastical interdict to which his delinquency had 

 subjected him. 



In the early church there were held to be five kinds of absolution : 

 by baptism ; by the eucharist ; declaratory, by word of mouth and 

 doctrine; precatory, by imposition of hands and prayer; judicial, In 

 relaxation of church censures. 



The Absolution as it now stands in the order for Horning and 

 Evening Prayer was first inserted in the Second Book of Edward VI. 

 On a subsequent revision the word minister was changed into priest. 

 The other two absolutions are coeval with the reformed Prayer Book. 



ABSORPTION (from almirbeo, to suck up) is the process by 

 which rays of heat are made to disappear. The surfaces of differ- 

 ent bodies vary greatly in absorbing power, and even in the same 

 body the power varies with the state of the surface as to colour, 

 roughness, &c. The subject will be considered in its proper place 

 under HEAT. 



ABSORPTION OF LIGHT is that process which takes place when 

 light enters an imperfectly transparent medium, in virtue of which a 

 portion of the light in continually stifled, or spent in producing some 

 physical effect, while the remainder is either directly transmitted, or 

 emerges after one or more internal reflections. 



A body absorbing all the light incident upon it would appear black. 

 and would be wholly invisible ; though, in point of fact, the blackest 

 body actually existing reflects some light from its surface ; while a 

 body absorbing none, but reflecting light of all kinds indifferently from 

 a multitude of irregularly placed surfaces, would appear white like 

 snow. In general, the different component parts of white light are 

 absorbed with unequal energy, and thus the light which escapes 

 absorption is coloured, as not containing the colours of the spectrum in 

 the proper proportion to form white light. In the great majority of 

 cases the colours of natural bodies are occasioned in this way. 



When light of any one kind enters a homogeneous medium, its 

 intensity decreases in geometric progression as the length of its path 

 within the medium increases in arithmetic in progression. This readily 

 follows from the fact that in any given case the quantity of light lost by 

 absorption is a given fraction of the quantity originally incident. (See 

 Herschel on Light, ' Encyclopaedia Metro politana/art. A bsorption. ) Accord- 

 ingly, in being transmitted directly across a stratum of the medium of 

 "thickness I, the intensity is reduced in the ratio of 1 to )', where r is a 

 fraction less than 1, or at most equal to 1. The quantity r varies 

 from one medium to another, and for the same medium from light of 

 one refrangibility to light of another. If r = 1 for light of all kinds, 

 the medium in colourless and transparent, like water, which for ordi- 

 nary purposes may be regarded as such. If r were less than 1, but the 

 name for light of all kinds, the medium, iu a stratum of sufficient 

 thickness, would cease to transmit light, without becoming coloured in 

 smaller thicknesses ; but no such media are known to exist. When r 

 is less than 1, it always varies more or less with the kind of light, apd 

 therefore the transmitted light is coloured. 



If a, a', a" ... denote the original intensities of the various kinds of 

 light of which white light is made up, r, )', r" . . . the different values 

 of the fraction r for those kinds of light, the intensities after trans- 

 mission will be reduced to a r', aV, a" r "... The relative proportions 

 of these latter will determine the tint of the transmitted light. It is 

 to be remarked, that this tint will change, not only with a change in 

 the absorbing medium, but even while the medium remains the same, 

 with a change in the thickness t. While the total quantity of light 

 transmitted continually decreases as the thickness of the stratum 

 looked through is increased, the colour generally becomes purer and 

 purer, those colours for which r is least becoming more and more pre- 

 dominant. Sometimes however the change of tint with an increase on 

 thickness is very remarkable. Thus, solutions of the chrome salts in 

 general are green in tnvvll thickness, and passing through a sort of 

 neutral tint, become red when the thickness is sufficiently increased. 

 The reason of this is easily explained according to the principles just 

 laid down. The green, and a comparatively small quantity of red, arf 

 the colours which chiefly escape absorption at an early stage ; but as 

 the absorption goes on, the red, being absorbed less rapidly than the 

 green (r being less for a portion of the red than for the green), becomes 

 at length the predominant colour. 



