Poor Coleridge! it was laudanum, and not honey-dew or the milk of Paradise that inspired him. And perhaps we might trace all that part of the literature of wonder which comes from the dark, left-hand fairyland, to drugs; which would remove from the category of genius many a name that figures there now.
LIGHT PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL:
by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S.
A METAL is fixed and crystallized light, said H. P. Blavatsky—and was laughed at. Light was not then, nor is it yet, substantive, but a mode of motion—of the ether and of matter. The days when it was substantive and corpuscular, the days of Newton, had gone by.
But there are several indications of their return—with additions, the additions warranting H. P. Blavatsky's definition of a metal.
A crystal of metal consists of molecules, and they of the still smaller atoms. Each atom, in its turn, is made of the still smaller electrons or corpuscles. If these either are light, or are made of even smaller bodies which are, the definition is justified. This is the suggestion, or contention, of Professor Bragg, developed at a recent lecture delivered before the English Royal Institution.
Light is regarded as a spreading etheric pulsation, waves in ether. We have it as the visible seven colors from red up to violet, and beyond visibility as the ultra-violet. Still higher etheric pulses, according to the usual theory, are the x-rays. Professor Bragg applies his new corpuscular theory to the last alone, though he suggests that it also includes the ultra-violet rays—in which case it must include all the rest. He thinks the x-rays corpuscular because of a certain behavior; but the ultra-violet rays have the same behavior—and no one doubts their continuity with the lower rays down to—and far below—the red. What is the behavior on which the argument rests?
The term x-rays or kathode rays, as popularly used, covers three kinds of emanation in the tube or from radium. The first and grossest ingredient is ordinary matter, whirling atoms of the element helium. The next and finer, the intermediate, is electrons, corpuscles. The third and finest is x-rays proper, hitherto considered as merely etheric pulses. Professor Bragg calls them gamma rays, restricting the other term, x-rays, for other rays of properties so nearly the same that he includes them in the same argument.