other convenient instrument, cleave it oftentimes into thinner and thinner laminae, you shall find that until you come to a determinate thinness of them they shall appear transparent and colourless; but if you continue to split and divide them further, you shall find at last that each plate shall appear most lovely tinged or imbued with a determinate colour.  If, further, by any means you so flaw a pretty thick piece that one part begins to cleave a little from the other, and between these two there be gotten some pellucid medium, those laminated or pellucid bodies that fill that space shall exhibit several rainbows or coloured lines, the colours of which will be disposed and ranged according to the various thicknesses of the several parts of the plate.’  He then describes fully and clearly the experiment with pressed glasses already referred to:—­

’Take two small pieces of ground and polished looking-glass plate, each about the bigness of a shilling:  take these two dry, and with your forefingers and thumbs press them very hard and close together, and you shall find that when they approach each other very near there will appear several irises or coloured lines, in the same manner almost as in the Muscovy glass; and you may very easily change any of the colours of any part of the interposed body by pressing the plates closer and harder together, or leaving them more lax—­that is, a part which appeared coloured with a red, may presently be tinged with a yellow, blue, green, purple, or the like.  ‘Any substance,’ he says, ‘provided it be thin and transparent, will show these colours.’  Like Boyle, he obtained them with glass films; he also procured them with bubbles of pitch, rosin, colophony, turpentine, solutions of several gums, as gum arabic in water, any glutinous liquor, as wort, wine, spirit of wine, oyl of turpentine, glare of snails, &c.

Hooke’s writings show that even in his day the idea that both light and heat are modes of motion had taken possession of many minds.  ‘First,’ he says, ’that all kind of fiery burning bodies have their parts in motion I think will be easily granted me.  That the spark struck from a flint and steel is in rapid agitation I have elsewhere made probable;... that heat argues a motion of the internal parts is (as I said before) generally granted;... and that in all extremely hot shining bodies there is a very quick motion that causes light, as well as a more robust that causes heat, may be argued from the celerity wherewith the bodies are dissolved.  Next, it must be a vibrative motion.’ His reference to the quick motion of light and the more robust motion of heat is a remarkable stroke of sagacity; but Hooke’s direct insight is better than his reasoning; for the proofs he adduces that light is ‘a vibrating motion’ have no particular bearing upon the question.