LECTURE III.

RELATION OF THEORIES TO EXPERIENCE ORIGIN OF THE NOTION OF THE ATTRACTION OF GRAVITATION NOTION OF POLARITY, HOW GENERATED ATOMIC POLARITY STRUCTURAL ARRANGEMENTS DUE TO POLARITY ARCHITECTURE OF CRYSTALS CONSIDERED AS AN INTRODUCTION TO THEIR ACTION UPON LIGHT NOTION OF ATOMIC POLARITY APPLIED TO CRYSTALLINE STRUCTURE EXPERIMENTAL ILLUSTRATIONS CRYSTALLIZATION OF WATER EXPANSION BY HEAT AND BY COLD DEPORTMENT OF WATER CONSIDERED AND EXPLAINED BEARINGS OF CRYSTALLIZATION ON OPTICAL PHENOMENA REFRACTION DOUBLE REFRACTION POLARIZATION ACTION OF TOURMALINE CHARACTER OF THE BEAMS EMERGENT FROM ICELAND SPAR POLARIZATION BY ORDINARY REFRACTION AND REFLECTION DEPOLARIZATION

§ 1. Derivation of Theoretic Conceptions from Experience.

One of the objects of our last lecture, and that not the least important, was to illustrate the manner in which scientific theories are formed. They, in the first place, take their rise in the desire of the mind to penetrate to the sources of phenomena. From its infinitesimal beginnings, in ages long past, this desire has grown and strengthened into an imperious demand of man's intellectual nature. It long ago prompted Cæsar to say that he would exchange his victories for a glimpse of the sources of the Nile; it wrought itself into the atomic theories of Lucretius; it impelled Darwin to those daring speculations which of late years have so agitated the public mind. But in no case, while framing theories, does the imagination create its materials. It expands, diminishes, moulds, and refines, as the case may be, materials derived from the world of fact and observation.

This is more evidently the case in a theory like that of light, where the motions of a subsensible medium, the ether, are presented to the mind. But no theory escapes the condition. Newton took care not to encumber the idea of gravitation with unnecessary physical conceptions; but we know that he indulged in them, though he did not connect them with his theory. But even the theory, as it stands, did not enter the mind as a revelation dissevered from the world of experience. The germ of the conception that the sun and planets are held together by a force of attraction is to be found in the fact that a magnet had been previously seen to attract iron. The notion of matter attracting matter came thus from without, not from within. In our present lecture the magnetic force must serve as the portal into a new domain; but in the first place we must master its elementary phenomena.

The general facts of magnetism are most simply illustrated by a magnetized bar of steel, commonly called a bar magnet. Placing such a magnet upright upon a table, and bringing a magnetic needle near its bottom, one end of the needle is observed to retreat from the magnet, while the other as promptly approaches. The needle is held quivering there by some invisible influence exerted upon it. Raising the needle along the magnet, but still avoiding contact, the rapidity of its oscillations decreases, because the force acting upon it becomes weaker. At the centre the oscillations cease. Above the centre, the end of the needle which had been previously drawn towards the magnet retreats, and the opposite end approaches. As we ascend higher, the oscillations become more violent, because the force becomes stronger. At the upper end of the magnet, as at the lower, the force reaches a maximum; but all the lower half of the magnet, from E to S (fig. 22), attracts one end of the needle, while all the upper half, from E to N, attracts the opposite end. This doubleness of the magnetic force is called polarity, and the points near the ends of the magnet in which the forces seem concentrated are called its poles.