Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays

by Thomas Henry Huxley; George F. Barker; E. D. Cope; James Hutchison Stirling; John Tyndall

The optical character of these clouds was totally different from that of the dust which produced them. At right angles to the illuminating beam they discharged perfectly polarized light The cloud could be utterly quenched by a transparent Nicol’s prism, and the tube containing it reduced to optical emptiness.

The particles floating in the air of London being thus proved to be organic, I sought to burn them up at the focus of a concave reflector. One of the powerfully convergent mirrors employed in my experiments on combustion by dark rays was here made use of, but I failed in the attempt. Doubtless the floating particles are in part transparent to radiant heat, and are so far incombustible by such heat. Their rapid motion through the focus also aids their escape. They do not linger there sufficiently long to be consumed. A flame it was evident would burn them up, but I thought the presence of the flame would mask its own action among the particles.

In a cylindrical beam, which powerfully illuminated the dust of the laboratory, was placed an ignited spirit-lamp. Mingling with the flame, and round its rim, were seen wreaths of darkness resembling an intensely black smoke. On lowering the flame below the beam the same dark masses stormed upwards. They were at times blacker than the blackest smoke that I have ever seen issuing from the funnel of a steamer, and their resemblance to smoke was so perfect as to lead the most practiced observer to conclude that the apparently pure flame of the alcohol lamp required but a beam of sufficient intensity to reveal its clouds of liberated carbon.

But is the blackness smoke? The question presented itself in a moment. A red-hot poker was placed underneath the beam, and from it the black wreaths also ascended. A large hydrogen flame was next employed, and it produced those whirling masses of darkness far more copiously than either the spirit-flame or poker. Smoke was, therefore, out of the question.

What, then, was the blackness? It was simply that of stellar space; that is to say, blackness resulting from the absence from the track of the beam of all matter competent to scatter its light. When the flame was placed below the beam the floating matter was destroyed in situ; and the air, freed from this matter, rose into the beam, jostled aside the illuminated particles and substituted for their light the darkness due to its own perfect transparency. Nothing could more forcibly illustrate the invisibility of the agent which renders all things visible. The beam crossed, unseen, the black chasm formed by the transparent air, while at both sides of the gap the thick-strewn particles shone out like a luminous solid under the powerful illumination.

But here a difficulty meets us. It is not necessary to burn the particles to produce a stream of darkness. Without actual combustion, currents may be generated which shall exclude the floating matter, and therefore appear dark amid the surrounding brightness. I noticed this effect first on placing a red-hot copper ball below the beam, and permitting it to remain there until its temperature had fallen below that of boiling water. The dark currents, though much enfeebled, were still produced. They may also be produced by a flask filled with hot water.

To study this effect a platinum wire was stretched across the beam, the two ends of the wire being connected with the two poles of a voltaic battery. To regulate the strength of the current a rheostat was placed in the circuit. Beginning with a feeble current the temperature of the wire was gradually augmented, but before it reached the heat of ignition, a flat stream of air rose from it, which when looked at edgeways appeared darker and sharper than one of the blackest lines of Fraunhofer in the solar spectrum. Right and left of this dark vertical band the floating matter rose upwards, bounding definitely the non-luminous stream of air. What is the explanation? Simply this. The hot wire rarefied the air in contact with it, but it did not equally lighten the floating matter. The convection current of pure air therefore passed upwards among the particles, dragging them after it right and left, but forming between them an impassable black partition. In this way we render an account of the dark currents produced by bodies at a temperature below that of combustion.

Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbonic acid, so prepared as to exclude all floating particles, produce the darkness when poured or blown into the beam. Coal-gas does the same. An ordinary glass shade placed in the air with its mouth downwards permits the track of the beam to be seen crossing it. Let coal-gas or hydrogen enter the shade by a tube reaching to its top, the gas gradually fills the shade from the top downwards. As soon as it occupies the space crossed by the beam, the luminous track is instantly abolished. Lifting the shade so as to bring the common boundary of gas and air above the beam, the track flashes forth. After the shade is full, if it be inverted, the gas passes upwards like a black smoke among the illuminated particles.

The air of our London rooms is loaded with this organic dust, nor is the country air free from its pollution. However ordinary daylight may permit it to disguise itself, a sufficiently powerful beam causes the air in which the dust is suspended to appear as a semi-solid rather than as a gas. Nobody could, in the first instance, without repugnance place the mouth at the illuminated focus of the electric beam and inhale the dirt revealed there. Nor is the disgust abolished by the reflection that, although we do not see the nastiness, we are churning it in our lungs every hour and minute of our lives. There is no respite to this contact with dirt; and the wonder is, not that we should from time to time suffer from its presence, but that so small a portion of it would appear to be deadly to man.

And what is this portion? It was some time ago the current belief that epidemic diseases generally were propagated by a kind of malaria, which consisted of organic matter in a state of motor-decay; that when such matter was taken into the body through the lungs or skin, it had the power of spreading there the destroying process which had attacked itself. Such a spreading power was visibly exerted in the case of yeast. A little leaven was seen to leaven the whole lump, a mere speck of matter in this supposed state of decomposition being apparently competent to propagate indefinitely its own decay. Why should not a bit of rotten malaria work in a similar manner within the human frame? In 1836 a very wonderful reply was given to this question. In that year Cagniard de la Tour discovered the yeast plant, a living organism, which, when placed in a proper medium, feeds, grows, and reproduces itself, and in this way carries on the process which we name fermentation. Fermentation was thus proved to be a product of life instead of a process of decay.