It is natural henceforth to suppose that this medium is identical with the luminous ether, and that a luminous wave is an electromagnetic wave—­that is to say, a succession of alternating currents, which exist in the dielectric and even in the void, and possess an enormous frequency, inasmuch as they change their direction thousands of billions of times per second, and by reason of this frequency produce considerable induction effects.  Maxwell did not admit the existence of open currents.  To his mind, therefore, an electrical vibration could not produce condensations of electricity.  It was, in consequence, necessarily transverse, and thus coincided with the vibration of Fresnel; while the corresponding magnetic vibration was perpendicular to it, and would coincide with the luminous vibration of Neumann.

Maxwell’s theory thus establishes a close correlation between the phenomena of the luminous and those of the electromagnetic waves, or, we might even say, the complete identity of the two.  But it does not follow from this that we ought to regard the variation of an electric field produced at some one point as necessarily consisting of a real displacement of the ether round that point.  The idea of thus bringing electrical phenomena back to the mechanics of the ether is not, then, forced upon us, and the contrary idea even seems more probable.  It is not the optics of Fresnel which absorbs the science of electricity, it is rather the optics which is swallowed up by a more general theory.  The attempts of popularizers who endeavour to represent, in all their details, the mechanism of the electric phenomena, thus appear vain enough, and even puerile.  It is useless to find out to what material body the ether may be compared, if we content ourselves with seeing in it a medium of which, at every point, two vectors define the properties.

For a long time, therefore, we could remark that the theory of Fresnel simply supposed a medium in which something periodical was propagated, without its being necessary to admit this something to be a movement; but we had to wait not only for Maxwell, but also for Hertz, before this idea assumed a really scientific shape.  Hertz insisted on the fact that the six equations of the electric field permit all the phenomena to be anticipated without its being necessary to construct one hypothesis or another, and he put these equations into a very symmetrical form, which brings completely in evidence the perfect reciprocity between electrical and magnetic actions.  He did yet more, for he brought to the ideas of Maxwell the most striking confirmation by his memorable researches on electric oscillations.

Sec. 4.  ELECTRICAL OSCILLATIONS

The experiments of Hertz are well known.  We know how the Bonn physicist developed, by means of oscillating electric discharges, displacement currents and induction effects in the whole of the space round the spark-gap; and how he excited by induction at some point in a wire a perturbation which afterwards is propagated along the wire, and how a resonator enabled him to detect the effect produced.