70 EARLY LIFE. 



upon this fact. Now this is the origin of photography; 

 and had the note containing the suggestion in 1795 

 appeared, in all probability it would have set others on 

 the examination of the subject, and given us photo- 

 graphy half a century earlier than we have had it. 



The experiments and propositions as printed in the 

 Philosophical Transactions I have since considered as 

 proceeding in great part from confounding colours 

 made \>y flexion with those formed by reflection; for 

 I am convinced that all the phenomena in my experi- 

 ments may be explained without having recourse to 

 the supposition of different reflexibility, by consider- 

 ing the colours as formed by flexion and then reflected. 

 But there is a different reflexibility. 



The Newtonian is another kind, not of the white 

 rays being separated into their component parts by 

 one reflection, but of the rays being reflected instead 

 of refracted or transmitted ; and I showed that this 

 is owing, not to the different rays having different 

 capacities of reflection, but to their having, in the first 

 instance, been separated by refraction, the experiment 

 being not of reflection without previous refraction, 

 but after much refraction, and that their different 

 refrangibility is in truth alone the cause of their ap- 

 parent different reflexibility. I believe all opticians 

 have admitted the correctness of my reasoning in 

 this ; and that the different reflexibility of the New- 

 tonian system has long ceased to be admitted at all. 

 In these papers I only had a query as to different 

 flexibility, which Newton does not suggest; but in 



