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HISTORICAL SKETCH.
137

medium, although he became an advocate of the theory of emission. It is to Huyghens that the credit belongs of having first conceived the undulatory theory of light with sufficient distinctness to account for double refraction. After him, Young, Fresnel, and their followers, have greatly developed the theory, enabling it to account for the most complicated and wonderful phenomena.

Bacon on Heat.

190. With regard to the nature of heat, Bacon, whatever may be thought of his arguments, seems clearly to have recognized it as a species of motion. He says, "From these instances, viewed together and individually, the nature of which heat is the limitation seems to be motion;" and again he says, "But when we say of motion that it stands in the place of a genus to heat, we mean to convey, not that heat generates motion or motion heat (although even both may be true in some cases), but that essential heat is motion and nothing else."

Nevertheless it required nearly three centuries before the true theory of heat was sufficiently rooted to develop into a productive hypothesis.

Principle of Virtual Velocities.

191. In a previous chapter we have already detailed the labours in respect of heat of Davy, Rumford, and Joule. Galileo and Newton, if they did not grasp the dynamical nature of heat, had yet a clear conception of