II. The Bakerian Lecture. On the theory of light and colours

Abstract

Although the invention of plausible hypotheses, independent of any connection with experimental observations, can be of very little use in the promotion of natural knowledge; yet the discover of simple uniform principles, by which a great number of apparently heterogeneous phenomena are reduced to coherent and universal laws, must ever be allowed to be of considerable importance towards the improvement of the human intellect. The object of the present dissertation is not so much to pro­pose any opinions which are absolutely new, as to refer some theories, which have been already advanced, to their original inventors, to support them by additional evidence, and to apply them to a great number of diversified facts, which have hitherto been buried in obscurity. Nor is it absolutely necessary in this instance to produce a single new experiment; for of experi­ments there is already an ample store, which are so much the more unexceptionable, as they must have been conducted with­ out the least partiality for the system by which they will be explained; yet some facts, hitherto unobserved, will be brought forwards, in order to show the perfect agreement of that system with the multifarious phenomena of nature.