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Many of the phenomena that have been ascribed to extraordinary refraction seem to be occasioned by a partial or total reflection of the rays of light at the surfaces of strata of different densities. It is well known that when light falls obliquely upon the external surface of a transparent medium, as on a plate of glass, or stratum of air, one portion is reflected and the other transmitted, but when light falls very obliquely upon the internal surface, the whole is reflected and not a ray is transmitted; in all cases the angles made by the incident and reflected rays with a perpendicular to the surface being equal. As the brightness of the reflected image depends on the quantity of light, those arising from total reflection must be by far the most vivid. The delusive appearance of water, so well known to African travellers, and to the Arab of the desert, as the Lake of the Gazelles, is ascribed to the reflection which takes place between strata of air of different densities, owing to radiation of heat from the arid sandy plains. The mirage described by Captain Mundy, in his Journal of a Tour in India, probably arises from this cause. 'A deep precipitous valley below us, at the bottom of which I had seen one or two miserable villages in the morning, bore in the evening a complete resemblance to a beautiful lake; the vapour, which played the part of water,

ascending nearly half way up the sides of the vale, and on its bright surface trees and rocks being distinetly reflected. I had not been long contemplating the phenomenon, before a sudden storm came on and dropped a curtain of clouds over the scene."

An occurrence which happened on the 18th of November, 1804, was probably produced by reflection. Dr. Buchan, while watching the rising sun from the cliff about a mile to the east of Brighton, at the instant the solar disc emerged from the surface of the ocean, saw the cliff on which he was standing, a wind-mill, his own figure and that of a friend, depicted immediately opposite to him on the sea. This appearance lasted about ten minutes, till the sun had risen nearly his own diameter above the surface of the waves. The whole then seemed to be elevated into the air and successively vanished. The rays of the sun fell upon the cliff at an incidence of 73° from the perpendicular, and the sea was covered with a dense fog many yards in height, which gradually receded before the rising sun. When extraordinary refraction takes place laterally, the strata of variable density are perpendicular to the horizon, and when it is combined with vertical refraction, the objects are magnified as if seen through a telescope. From this cause, on the 26th of July, 1798, the

cliffs of France, fifty miles off, were seen as distinctly from Hastings as if they had been close at hand, and even Dieppe was said to have been visible in the afternoon.

The stratum of air in the horizon is so much thicker and more dense than the stratum in the vertical, that the sun's light is diminished 1300 times in passing through it, which enables us to look at him when setting without being dazzled. The loss of light, and consequently of heat, by the absorbing power of the atmosphere, increases with the obliquity of incidence. Of ten thousand rays falling on its surface, 8123 arrive at a given point of the earth if they fall perpendicularly; 7024 arrive if the angle of direction be fifty degrees; 2831 if it be seven degrees; and only five rays will arrive through a horizontal stratum. Since so great a quantity of light is lost in passing through the atmosphere, many celestial objects may be altogether invisible from the plain, which may be seen from elevated situations. Diminished splendour and the false estimate we make of distance from the number of intervening objects, lead us to suppose the sun and moon to be much larger when in the horizon than at any other altitude, though their apparent diameters are then somewhat less. Instead of the sudden transitions of light and darkness, the reflective power of the

air adorns nature with the rosy and golden hues of the Aurora, and twilight. Even when the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon, a sufficient portion of light remains to show that, at the height of thirty miles, it is still dense enough to reflect light. The atmosphere scatters the sun's rays, and gives all the beautiful tints and cheerfulness of day. It transmits the blue light in greatest abundance; the higher we ascend, the sky assumes a deeper hue, but in the expanse of space, the sun and stars must appear like brilliant specks in profound blackness.

SECTION XX.

It is impossible thus to trace the path of a sunbeam through our atmosphere without feeling a desire to know its nature, by what power it traverses the immensity of space, and the various modifications it undergoes at the surfaces and the interior of terrestrial substances.

Sir Isaac Newton proved the compound nature of white light, as emitted from the sun, by passing a sunbeam through a glass prism, which, separating the rays by refraction, formed a spectrum or oblong image of the sun, consisting of seven colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet; of which the red is the least

refrangible, and the violet the most; but when he reunited these seven rays by means of a lens, the compound beam became pure white as before. He insulated each coloured ray, and finding that it was no longer capable of decomposition by refraction, concluded that white light consists of seven kinds of homogeneous light, and that to the same colour the same refrangibility ever belongs, and to the same refrangibility the same colour. Since the discovery of absorbent media, however, it appears that this is not the constitution of the solar spectrum.

We know of no substance that is either perfectly opaque or perfectly transparent; for even gold may be beaten so thin as to be pervious to light; and, on the contrary, the clearest crystal, the purest air or water, stop or absorb its rays when transmitted, and gradually extinguish them. as they penetrate to greater depths. On this account, objects cannot be seen at the bottom of very deep water, and many more stars are visible to the naked eye from the tops of mountains than from the valleys. The quantity of light that is incident on any transparent substance is always greater than the sum of the reflected and refracted rays. A small quantity is irregularly reflected in all directions by the imperfections of the polish by which we are enabled to see the surface; but

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