A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



gravitation; nay, they even hint that without this 

 strange something, ether, there would be no such 

 thing as matter in the universe. If these contentions 

 of the modern physicist are justified, then this in- 

 tangible ether is incomparably the most important 

 as well as the "largest and most uniform substance or 

 body" in the universe. Its discovery may well be 

 looked upon as one of the most important feats of the 

 nineteenth century. 



For a discovery of that century it surely is, in the 

 sense that all the known evidences of its existence were 

 gathered in that epoch. True dreamers of all ages 

 have, for metaphysical reasons, imagined the existence 

 of intangible fluids in space they had, indeed, peo- 

 pled space several times over with different kinds of 

 ethers, as Maxwell remarks but such vague dream- 

 ings no more constituted the discovery of the modern 

 ether than the dream of some pre-Columbian visionary 

 that land might lie beyond the unknown waters con- 

 stituted the discovery of America. In justice it must 

 be admitted that Huyghens, the seventeenth-century 

 originator of the undulatory theory of light, caught a 

 glimpse of the true ether; but his contemporaries and 

 some eight generations of his successors were utterly 

 deaf to his claims ; so he bears practically the same re- 

 lation to the nineteenth-century discoverers of ether 

 that the Norseman bears to Columbus. 



The true Columbus of the ether was Thomas Young. 

 His discovery was consummated in the early days of 

 the nineteenth century, when he brought forward the 

 first conclusive proofs of the undulatory theory of light. 

 To say that light consists of undulations is to postulate 



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