grasped this idea, they must have noticed the enormous difficulty presented by the laceration which the ether must experience if it moves through pores or interstices among the atoms of matter.
§ 3. It has occurred to me that, without contravening anything we know from observation of nature, we may simply deny the scholastic axiom that two portions of matter cannot jointly occupy the same space, and may assert, as an admissible hypothesis, that ether does occupy the same space as ponderable matter, and that ether is not displaced by ponderable bodies moving through space occupied by ether. But how then could matter act on ether, and ether act on matter, to produce the known phenomena of light (or radiant heat), generated by the action of ponderable bodies 011 ether, and acting on ponderable bodies to produce its visual, chemical, phosphorescent, thermal, and photographic effects ? There is no difficulty in answering this question if, as it probably is, ether is a compressible and dilatable * solid. We have only to suppose that the atom exerts force on the ether, by which condensation or rarefaction is produced within the space occupied by the atom. At present t I .confine myself, for the sake of simplicity, to the suggestion of a spherical atom producing condensation and rarefaction, with concentric spherical surfaces of equal density, but the same total quantity of ether within its boundary as the quantity in an equal volume of free undisturbed ether.
§ 4. Consider now such an atom given at rest anywhere in space occupied by ether. Let force be applied to it to cause it to move in any direction, first with gradually increasing speed, and after that with uniform speed. If this speed is anything less than the velocity of light, the force may be mathematically proved to become zero at some short time after the instant when the velocity of the atom becomes uniform, and to remain zero for ever thereafter. What takes place is this :
§ 5. Daring all the time in which the velocity of the atom is being augmented from zero, two sets of non-periodic waves, one of them equi-voluminal, the other irrotational (which is therefore condensational-rarefactional), are being sent out in
* To deny this property is to attribute to ether infinitely great resistance against forces tending to condense it or to dilate it—which seems, in truth, an infinitely difficult assumption.
t Further developments of the suggested idea have been contributed ±0 the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and to the Congres International de Physique, held in Paris in August. (Proc. R.S.E. July 1900; vol. of reports, in French, of the Cong. Inter.; and Phil. Mag., Aug:., Sept., 1900.)
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all directions through the surrounding ether. The rears of the last of these waves leave the atom, at some time after its acceleration ceases. This time, if the motion of the ether outside the atom, close beside it, is infinitesimal, is equal to the time taken by the slower wave (which is the equi-voluminal) to travel the diameter of the atom, and is the short time referred to in § 4. When the rears of both waves have got clear of the atom, the ether within it and in the space around it, left clear by both rears, has come to a steady state of motion relatively to the atom. This steady motion approximates more and more nearly to uniform motion in parallel lines, at greater and greater distances from the atom. At a distance of twenty diameters it differs exceedingly little from uniformity.
§ 6. But it is only when the velocity of the atom is very small in comparison with the velocity of light, that the disturbance of the ether in the space close round the atom is infinitesimal. The propositions asserted in § 4 and the first sentence of § 5 are true, however little the final velocity of the atom falls short of the velocity of light. If this uniform final velocity of the atom exceeds the velocity of light, by ever so little, a non-periodic conical wave of equi-voluminal motion is produced, according to the same principle as that illustrated for sound by Mach's beautiful photographs of illumination bv electric spark, showing, by changed refractivity, the condensational-rarefactional disturbance produced in air by the motion through it of a rifle bullet. The semi-vertical angle of the cone, whether in air or ether, is equal to the angle whose sine is the ratio of the wave velocity to the velocity of the moving body *.
* On the same principle we see that a body moving steadily (andr with little error, we may say also that a fish or water-fowl propelling itself by fins or web-feet) through calm water, either floating on the: surface or wholly submerged at some moderate distance below the surface, produces no wave disturbance if its velocity is less than the minimum wave velocity due to gravity and surface tension (being about 23 cms. per second, or '44 of a nautical mile per hour, whether for sea water or fresh watery; and if its velocity exceeds the minimum wave velocity, it produces a wave disturbance bounded by two lines inclined on each side of its wake at angles each equal to the angle whose sine is the minimum wave velocity divided by the velocity of the moving body. It is easy for anyone to observe this by dipping vertically a pencil or a walking-stick into still water in a pond (or even in a good-sized hand basin), and moving it horizontally, first with exceeding small speed, and afterwards faster and faster. I first noticed it nineteen years ago, and described observaticns for an experimental determination of the minimum velocity of waves, in a letter to William Froude, published in ‘ Nature 7 for October 26, and in the Phil. Mag. for November 1871, from which the following is extracted. “ [Recently, in the schooner yacht LaUa
