Produced by Jana Srna, Alexander Bauer, Erica Pfister-Altschul, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) A STUDY OF SPLASHES _BY THE SAME AUTHOR._ * * * * * A FIRST COURSE OF PHYSICAL LABORATORY PRACTICE. CONTAINING 264 EXPERIMENTS. _With Illustrations. Crown 8vo, 4s. 6d._ * * * * * DYNAMICS OF ROTATION. AN ELEMENTARY INTRODUCTION TO RIGID DYNAMICS. _Crown 8vo, 4s. 6d._ * * * * * LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA. [Illustration: Permanent Splashes left where a Projectile has entered an Armour-plate. [_See page 120._] A STUDY OF SPLASHES BY A. M. WORTHINGTON C.B., M.A., F.R.S. HEADMASTER AND PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AT THE ROYAL NAVAL ENGINEERING COLLEGE, DEVONPORT WITH 197 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM INSTANTANEOUS PHOTOGRAPHS LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1908 _All rights reserved_ DEDICATED TO THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF RUGBY SCHOOL AND ITS FORMER PRESIDENT ARTHUR SIDGWICK IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE ENCOURAGEMENT GIVEN TO THE EARLY OBSERVATIONS MADE IN BOYHOOD BY MY OLD SCHOOL-FRIEND H. F. NEWALL FROM WHICH THIS STUDY SPRANG. PREFACE This publication is an attempt to present in a form acceptable to the general reader the outcome of an inquiry conducted by the aid of instantaneous photography, which was begun about fourteen years ago. The author, in 1894, had occasion to lecture at the Royal Institution on the "Splash of a Drop," of which he had already made a somewhat prolonged study. That lecture, which was subsequently reprinted in the "Romance of Science" series by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, dealt largely with the splash of a drop falling on a solid plate, with which the present volume is not concerned. At the close of the lecture were exhibited for the first time a few photographs of some of the phenomena now dealt with, which the author had just succeeded in taking with the help of his friend Mr. R. S. Cole. The success of the photographs and the additional information they afforded led to a long photographic investigation, which formed the subject of two papers[A] in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society. Except for two magazine articles,[B] the results of this work have not been presented to the general public. Moreover, in the illustrations printed by the Royal Society much of the beauty of the original photographs was lost in the reproduction, or was sacrificed in a selection of which the only object was the elucidation of points of technical scientific interest.