depends in some way on the motion of the rest; and at the same time these connections must be capable of a certain kind of elastic yielding, since the communication of motion is not instantaneous, but occupies time.
The medium is therefore capable of receiving and storing up two kinds of energy, namely, the “actual” energy depending on the motions of its parts, and “potential” energy, consisting of the work which the medium will do in recovering from displacement in virtue of its elasticity.
The propagation of undulations consists in the continual transformation of one of these forms of energy into the other alternately, and at any instant the amount of energy in the whole medium is equally divided, so that half is energy of motion, and half is elastic resilience.
(7) A medium having such a constitution may be capable of other kinds of motion and displacement than those which produce the phenomena of light and heat, and some of these may be of such a kind that they may evidenced to our senses by the phenomena they produce.
(8) Now we know that the luminiferous medium is in certain cases acted on by magnetism; for Faraday[1] discovered that when a plane polarized ray traverses a transparent diamagnetic medium in the direction of the lines of magnetic force produced by magnets or currents in the neighbourhood, the plane of polarization is caused to rotate.
M. Verdet[2] has since discovered that if a paramagnetic body, such as solution of perchloride of iron in ether, be substituted for the diamagnetic body, the rotation is in the opposite direction.
Now Professor W. Thomson[3] has pointed out that no distribution of forces acting between the parts of a medium whose only motion is that of the luminous vibrations, is sufficient to account for the phenomena, but that we must admit the existence of a motion in the medium depending on the magnetization, in addition to the vibratory motion which constitutes light.
It is true that the rotation by magnetism of the plane of polarization has been observed only in media of considerable density; but the properties of the magnetic field are not so much altered by the substitution of one medium for another, or for a vacuum, as to allow us to suppose that the dense medium does anything more than merely modify the motion of the ether. We have therefore warrantable grounds for inquiring whether there may not be a motion of the ethereal medium going on wherever magnetic effects are observed, and we have some reason to suppose that this motion is one of rotation, having the direction of the magnetic force as its axis.
(9) We may now consider another phenomenon observed in the electromagnetic
