Various other colourless substances of the most diverse properties, optical and chemical, might be employed for this experiment.  The incipient cloud, in every case, would exhibit this superb blue; thus proving to demonstration that particles of infinitesimal size, without any colour of their own, and irrespective of those optical properties exhibited by the substance in a massive state, are competent to produce the blue colour of the sky.

Sec. 13. Polarization of Skylight.

But there is another subject connected with our firmament, of a more subtle and recondite character than even its colour.  I mean that ‘mysterious and beautiful phenomenon,’ as Sir John Herschel calls it, the polarization of the light of the sky.  Looking at various points of the blue firmament through a Nicol prism, and turning the prism round its axis, we soon notice variations of brightness.  In certain positions of the prism, and from certain points of the firmament, the light appears to be wholly transmitted, while it is only necessary to turn the prism round its axis through an angle of ninety degrees to materially diminish the intensity of the light.  Experiments of this kind prove that the blue light sent to us by the firmament is polarized, and on close scrutiny it is also found that the direction of most perfect polarization is perpendicular to the solar rays.  Were the heavenly azure like the ordinary light of the sun, the turning of the prism would have no effect upon it; it would be transmitted equally during the entire rotation of the prism.  The light of the sky may be in great part quenched, because it is in great part polarized.

The same phenomenon is exhibited in perfection by our actinic clouds, the only condition necessary to its production being the smallness of the particles.  In all cases, and with all substances, the cloud formed at the commencement, when the precipitated particles are sufficiently fine, is blue.  In all cases, moreover, this fine blue cloud polarizes perfectly the beam which illuminates it, the direction of polarization enclosing an angle of 90 deg. with the axis of the illuminating beam.

It is exceedingly interesting to observe both the growth and the decay of this polarization.  For ten or fifteen minutes after its first appearance, the light from a vividly illuminated incipient cloud, looked at horizontally, is absolutely quenched by a Nicol prism with its longer diagonal vertical.  But as the sky-blue is gradually rendered impure by the introduction of particles of too large a size, in other words, as real clouds begin to be formed, the polarization begins to deteriorate, a portion of the light passing through the prism in all its positions, as it does in the case of skylight.  It is worthy of note that for some time after the cessation of perfect polarization the residual light which passes, when the Nicol is in its position of minimum transmission, is of a gorgeous blue, the whiter light of the cloud being extinguished.  When the cloud-texture has become sufficiently coarse to approximate to that of ordinary clouds, the rotation of the Nicol ceases to have any sensible effect on the light discharged at right angles to the beam.