The Effects of tropical light on white men / by Major Chas. E. Woodruff.

  • Woodruff, Charles Edward, 1860-1915.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Effects of tropical light on white men / by Major Chas. E. Woodruff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    is of the same character but more intense than the ultra-violet which, in turn, is more intense than the violet rays, and these again more intense than the red or infra-red. But we must keep constantly in mind that they are ether stresses capable of produc- ing motions of corpuscles or atoms upon which they impinge, even to the extent of dissociating the atoms of a molecule, or the corpuscles of an atom. Their power to do this diminishes from the source in the ratio of the square of the distance. They are not actual movements of the ether, for the ether, about which physicists know more than they do of any other kind of matter, is immovable, and has no inertia. The older physicists held that light waves were actual transverse vibrations or motions of the ether, and the majority teach so yet perhaps, but the new view, now becoming generally accepted, is that the waves are transmitted stresses. We can liken the matter to the stress on an upright bar of iron by placing a weight on it. It instantly transmits the stress .to its base, without moving, and though we know as little about the nature of gravitation, and this stress, as we do of the ether stress, yet we cannot deny either. Actinism a Chemical Effect Now the fact that all these ether stresses or waves cause phenomena in the field of chemistry, has led to the view of the identity of all these forces, and indeed Crookes says,9 we have actually touched the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another. Many physicists have elaborated