560 Dr. C. K. Akin on Ray-Transmutation. 



Association, and which was as follows : — " Some time ago, I 

 received a letter from the Assistant General Secretary of the 

 British Association, in which my attention was requested to a 

 Resolution, which was adopted by the General Committee at the 

 last Meeting of the Association, and to the effect, ' That Prof. 

 Griffith and Dr. Akin be requested to continue their Report 

 on the Transmutation of Spectral Rays/ In answer to this 

 communication, I now beg leave to state that, after the expe- 

 rience of the last two years, and more especially of last summer, 

 I feel it would be a hopeless undertaking for me to continue, 

 at Oxford, the experiments begun there. Moreover, I am not 

 sure whether, after the end of the present year, I shall be able 

 to give my attention any longer to scientific researches." Thus, 

 as far as I am concerned, the trial of the "arrangements devised 

 by" me, and of the apparatus constructed for the experiments 

 begun at Oxford, is at an end. Such being the case, I have no 

 doubt that, with the means at his command and his experimental 

 proficiency, Prof. Tyndall will now realize and " publish " a dis- 

 covery which I have assigned the methods for accomplishing, 

 and which I should have probably effected myself, I may say, 

 years ago, had I been seconded as I had hoped, either by per- 

 sons. or by circumstances. Astronomers have placed the merit 

 of the mathematicians who first conjectured the existence of 

 Neptune above that of the practical observers who actually dis- 

 covered that planet. In my own case, I have made considerable 

 sacrifices of time, and even of feeling, in order to prove by ex- 

 periment what I had deduced originally from logical reasonings. 

 Being now practically shut out from pursuing the subject any 

 further, I shall leave it for physicists to decide whatever merit 

 may belong to the originator of the research, as' compared with 

 the merit of him, whoever it may be, who, more fortunate, shall 

 bring the research to a satisfactory close*. 

 London, November 1864. 



* Prof. Tyndall's experiments on rays transmitted by iodine dissolved in 

 bisulphide of carbon, and reported in the November Number of the Philoso- 

 phical Magazine, although they may ultimately prove to be correct, are 

 evidently inconclusive when made in the manner reported — that is, appa- 

 rently, in daylight. I have also observed that, in looking through a prism 

 of such iodine solution, at certain thicknesses, a double image of objects 

 appears — the one violet, the other red. Now, since bisulphide of carbon is 

 about equally powerful as an absorbent both of Ritteric or chemical and of 

 Ilerschellic or caloric rays, it remains to be proved whether the Ritteric rays 

 do not cling, as it were, in transmission to the violet rays, in a similar 

 manner to that in which the Herschellic rays adhere to the red rays — the 

 penetrative power of the invisible rays exceeding in both cases that of the 

 corresponding visible rays. 



