Science from an Easy ChairLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
Science from an Easy Chair
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history; Science
No doubt the question arises, “Why do clouds of the finest particles
reflect a predominant amount of blue light rather than yellow or green
or red?” That question is answered by mathematicians in accordance with
what is ascertained as to the nature and properties of light, but it
would require a long treatise to put those matters even in outline
before the reader. We may in the meanwhile accept the conclusions of the
physicists, and interest ourselves in seeing how they apply to some of
the concrete facts about colour in Nature.
There are other instances of “blueness” due to the reflection of light
from a cloud of excessively minute particles besides that of the azure
sky and the blue, curling smoke of a wood fire. A familiar instance is
the blueness of translucent bodies, such as the “white” of a boiled
plover’s egg, especially when a bit of it is placed on a dead-black
ground. The bluish appearance of watered London milk is another
instance. These bodies look blue owing to the fine, colourless particles
suspended in them, which act on light in the same way as do the fine
particles of newly-produced smoke. Another very interesting case is the
blue colour of the iris of the eye of man and other animals. It is not
due to any blue pigment, but to a reflection from fine particles in the
translucent, but turbid, tissue of the iris overlying the dark, black
chamber of the eye. White geese and white cats frequently have blue
eyes, the blue being thus produced. The only pigment which occurs in the
human eye is a brown one, which gives a colour varying from amber yellow
to very dark brown, almost black, according to the quantity present.
When a very little of it is present it gives, in combination with the
blue appearance of the unpigmented iris, a green tint, so that green
eyes owe their colour to the same combination of causes as does the
green skin of the little tree-frogs, or “rainettes.”
No solvent will extract any pigment from the skin of the blue frog—nor
by the finest trituration can one obtain any coloured particles from it;
only fine black granules can be separated. Alcohol removes the yellow
pigment from the skin of a green tree-frog (killed, of course, for the
experiment), and for a minute or two the skin becomes blue when its
yellow pigment is thus removed by immersion in spirit; but it rapidly
becomes a dull greyish-brown in colour, and so remains; the green cannot
be preserved in spirit-specimens. It is not fully explained how such a
uniform “dead” blue is produced by the reflection of light from fine
particles, as that observed in the blue frog’s skin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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