"Colour," he says in another place,[1] "is nothing but the disturbance of light by the communication of the pulse to other transparent mediums, that is by the refraction thereof." His precise hypothesis regarding the different colours was[2] "that Blue is an impression on the Retina of an oblique and confus'd pulse of light, whose weakest part precedes, and whose strongest follows. And, that red is an impression on the Retina of an oblique and confus'd pulse of light, whose strongest part precedes, and whose weakest follows."
Hooke's theory of colour was completely overthrown, within a few years of its publication, by one of the earliest discoveries of Isaac Newton (b. 1642, d. 1727). Newton, who was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1667, had in the beginning of 1666 obtained a triangular prism, "to try therewith the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours." For this purpose, "having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the Sun's light, I placed my Prisme at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertisement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but after a while applying myself to consider them more circumspectly, I became surprised to see them in an oblong form, which, according to the received laws of Refraction, I expected should have been circular." The length of the coloured spectrum was in fact about five times as great as its breadth.
This puzzling fact he set himself to study; and after more experiments the true explanation was discovered---namely, that ordinary white light is really a mixture of rays of every variety of colour, and that the elongation of the spectrum is due to the differences in the refractive power of the glass for these different rays.
“Amidst these thoughts," he tells us,[3] "I was forced from
