Some substances send back hardly any waves of light, but let them all pass through them, and thus we cannot see them.  A pane of clear glass, for instance, lets nearly all the light-waves pass through it, and therefore you often cannot see that the glass is there, because no light-messengers come back to you from it.  Thus people have sometimes walked up against a glass door and broken it, not seeing it was there.  Those substances are transparent which, for some reason unknown to us, allow the ether waves to pass through them without shaking the atoms of which the substance is made.  In clear glass, for example, all the light-waves pass through without affecting the substance of the glass; while in a white wall the larger part of the rays are reflected back to your eye, and those which pass into the wall, by giving motion to its atoms lose their own vibrations.

Into polished shining metal the waves hardly enter at all, but are thrown back from the surface; and so a steel knife or a silver spoon are very bright, and are clearly seen.  Quicksilver is put at the back of looking-glasses because it reflects so many waves.  It not only sends back those which come from the sun, but those, too, which come from your face.  So, when you see yourself in a looking-glass, the sun-waves have first played on your face and bounded off from it to the looking-glass; then, when they strike the looking-glass, they are thrown back again on to the retina of your eye, and you see your own face by means of the very waves you threw off from it an instant before.

But the reflected light-waves do more for us than this.  They not only make us see things, but they make us see them in different colours.  What, you will ask, is this too the work of the sunbeams?  Certainly; for if the colour we see depends on the size of the waves which come back to us, then we must see things coloured differently according to the waves they send back.  For instance, imagine a sunbeam playing on a leaf:  part of its waves bound straight back from it to our eye and make us see the surface of the leaf, but the rest go right into the leaf itself, and there some of them are used up and kept prisoners.  The red, orange, yellow, blue, and violet waves are all useful to the leaf, and it does not let them go again.  But it cannot absorb the green waves, and so it throws them back, and they travel to your eye and make you see a green colour.  So when you say a leaf is green, you mean that the leaf does not want the green waves of the sunbeam, but sends them back to you.  In the same way the scarlet geranium rejects the red waves; this table sends back brown waves; a white tablecloth sends back nearly the whole of the waves, and a black coat scarcely any.  This is why, when there is very little light in the room, you can see a white tablecloth while you would not be able to distinguish a black object, because the few faint rays that are there, are all sent back to you from a white surface.