Micrographia eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 539 pages of information about Micrographia.

Micrographia eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 539 pages of information about Micrographia.

By this Hypothesis there is no one experiment of colour that I have yet met with, but may be, I conceive, very rationably solv’d, and perhaps, had I time to examine several particulars requisite to the demonstration of it, I might prove it more than probable, for all the experiments about the changes and mixings of colours related in the Treatise of Colours, published by the Incomparable Mr. Boyle, and multitudes of others which I have observ’d, do so easily and naturally flow from those principles, that I am very apt to think it probable, that they own their production to no other secundary cause:  As to instance in two or three experiments.  In the twentieth Experiment, this Noble Authour has shewn that the deep bluish purple-colour of Violets, may be turn’d into a Green, by Alcalizate Salts, and to a Red by acid; that is, a Purple consists of two colours, a deep Red, and a deep Blue; when the Blue is diluted, or altered, or destroy’d by acid Salts, the Red becomes predominant, but when the Red is diluted by Alcalizate, and the Blue heightned, there is generated a Green; for of a Red diluted, is made a Yellow, and Yellow and Blue make a Green.

Now, because the spurious pulses which cause a Red and a Blue, do the one follow the clear pulse, and the other precede it, it usually follows, that those Saline refracting bodies which do dilute the colour of the one, do deepen that of the other.  And this will be made manifest by almost all kinds of Purples, and many sorts of Greens, both these colours consisting of mixt colours; for if we suppose A and A in the ninth Figure, to represent two pulses of clear light, which follow each other at a convenient distance, AA, each of which has a spurious pulse preceding it, as BB, which makes a Blue, and another following it, as CC, which makes a Red, the one caus’d by tinging particles that have a greater refraction, the other by others that have a less refracting quality then the liquor or Menstruum in which these are dissolv’d, whatsoever liquor does so alter the refraction of the one, without altering that of the other part of the ting’d liquor, must needs very much alter the colour of the liquor; for if the refraction of the dissolvent be increas’d, and the refraction of the tinging particles not altered, then will the preceding spurious pulse be shortned or stopt, and not out-run the clear pulse so much; so that BB will become EE, and the Blue be diluted, whereas the other spurious pulse which follows will be made to lagg much more, and be further behind AA than before, and CC will become ff, and so the Yellow or Red will be heightned.

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Micrographia from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.