received the name of Bologna stone or Bologna phosphorus, has the property of shining in the dark after it has been exposed for some time to sunlight; and the storage of light which seemed to be here involved was more easily explicable on the corpuscular theory than on any other. The evidence in this quarter, however, pointed the other way when it was found that phosphorescent substances do not necessarily emit the same kind of light as that which was used to stimulate them.
In accordance with his earliest discovery, Newton considered colour to be an inherent characteristic of light, and inferred that it must be associated with some definite quality of the corpuscles or aether-vibrations. The corpuscles corresponding to different colours would, he remarked, like sonorous bodies of different pitch, excite vibrations of different types in the aether; and “if by any means those [aether-vibrations] of unequal bignesses be separated from one another, the largest beget a Sensation of a Red colour, the least or shortest of a deep Violet, and the intermediate ones, of intermediate colours; much after the manner that bodies, according to their several sizes, shapes, and motions, excite vibrations in the Air of various bignesses, which, according to those bignesses, make several Tones in Sound."[1]
This sentence is the first enunciation of the great principle that homogeneous light is essentially periodic in its nature, and that differences of period correspond to differences of colour. The analogy with Sound is obvious; and it may be remarked in passing that Newton's theory of periodic vibrations in an elastic medium, which he developed[2] in connexion with the explanation of Sound, would alone entitle him to a place among those who have exercised the greatest influence on the theory of light, even if he had made no direct contribution to the latter subject.
