cient polariser of the electric ray; it does transmit the ordinary and the extraordinary rays with unequal intensities, but even a considerable thickness of it does not completely absorb one of the two rays.
In Hertz's polarising gratings, electric vibrations are transmitted perpendicular to the wires, the vibrations parallel to the wires being reflected or absorbed. Such gratings would be found to exhibit electric anisotropy, the conductivity in the direction of the wires being very much greater than the conductivity across the wires. The vibrations transmitted through the gratings are thus perpendicular to the direction of maximum conductivity, or parallel to the direction of greatest resistance. The vibration absorbed is parallel to the direction of maximum conductivity.
As the nemalite and chrysotile polarised the electric ray by unequal absorption in the two directions, I was led to investigate whether they, too, exhibited unequal conductivities in the two directions of absorption and transmission.
Nemalite, unfortunately, is difficult to obtain; I have, however, in my possession two specimens of which one is fairly large, and I obtained with it strong polarisation effects. The second piece is not as good as the first, and is rather small. I cut from this latter piece a square of uniform thickness, the adjacent sides of the square being parallel to the directions of transmission and absorption respectively. The resistances of equal lengths in the two directions (with the same cross section) were now measured. The resistance in the direction of transmission was found to be 35,000 megohms, and that in the direction of absorption, only 14,000 megohms.
