course; and differences of density of the aether between one material medium and another account on these principles for the reflexion and refraction of light. The condensation or rarefaction of the aether due to a material body extends to some little distance from the surface of the body, so that the inflexion due to it is really continuous, and not abrupt; and this further explains diffraction, which Newton took to be "only a new kind of refraction, caused, perhaps, by the external aether's beginning to grow rarer a little before it came at the opake body, than it was in free spaces."
Although the regular vibrations of Newton's aether were not supposed to constitute light, its irregular turbulence seems to have represented fairly closely his conception of heat. He supposed that when light is absorbed by a material body, vibrations are set up in the aether, and are recognizable as the heat which is always generated in such cases. The conduction of heat from hot bodies to contiguous cold ones he conceived to be effected by vibrations of the aether propagated between them; and he supposed that it is the violent agitation of aethereal motions which excites incandescent substances to emit light.
Assuming with Newton that light is not actually constituted by the vibrations of an aether, even though such vibrations may exist in close connexion with it, the most definite and easily conceived supposition is that rays of light arc streams of corpuscles emitted by luminous bodies. Although this was not the hypothesis of Descartes himself, it was so thoroughly akin to his general scheme that the scientific men of Newton's generation, who were for the most part deeply imbued with the Cartesian philosophy, instinctively selected it from the wide choice of hypotheses which Newton had offered them, and by later writers it was generally associated with Newton's name. A curious argument in its favour was drawn from a phenomenon which had then been known for nearly half a century: Vincenzo Cascariolo, a shoemaker of Bologna, had discovered, about 1630, that a substance, which afterwards
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