(291.) Still, it is by no means impossible that the Newtonian theory of light, if cultivated with equal diligence with the Huyghenian, might lead to an equally plausible explanation of phenomena now regarded as beyond its reach. M. Biot is the author of the hypothesis we have already mentioned of a rotatory motion of the particles of light about their axes. He has employed it only for a very limited purpose; but it might doubtless be carried much farther; and by admitting only the regular emission of the luminous particles at equal intervals of time, and in similar states of motion from the shining body, which does not seem a very forced supposition, all the phenomena of interference at least would be readily enough explained without the admission of an ether. (292.) The optical examination of crystallized substances affords one among many fine examples of the elucidation which every branch of science is capable of affording to every other. The indefatigable researches of Dr. Brewster and others have shown that the phenomena exhibited by polarized light in its transmission through crystals afford a certain indication of the most important points relating to the structure of the crystals themselves, and thus become most valuable characters by which to recognise their internal constitution. It was Newton who first showed of what importance as a physical character,--as the indication of other properties,--the action of a body on light might become; but the characters afforded by the use of polarized light as an instrument of experimental enquiry are so marked and intimate, that they may almost be said to have furnished us with a kind of intellectual sense, by which we are enabled to scrutinize the internal arrangement of those wonderful structures which Nature builds up by her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty which we are never weary of admiring. In this point of view the science of optics has rendered to mineralogy and crystallography services not less important than to astronomy by the invention of the telescope, or to natural history by that of the microscope; while the relations which have been discovered to exist between the optical properties of bodies and their crystalline forms, and even their chemical habitudes, have afforded numerous and beautiful instances of general laws concluded from laborious and painful induction, and curiously exemplifying the simplicity of nature as it emerges slowly from an entangled mass of particulars in which, at first, neither order nor connection can be traced. CHAP. III. OF COSMICAL PHENOMENA. _Astronomy and Celestial Mechanics._