Note 58 — Chapter VI

This paper of Melloni’s will be found in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, for 1843. The conclusions are highly ingenious, but they rest entirely on the analogy supposed to be discovered between the relations of heat, like light, to the coloured rays of the spectrum. This, it must be remembered, is not the case, since even Sir William Herschel showed that red light might exist with only a minimum of calorific power, notwithstanding the fact, that the maximum heat-ray of the spectrum coincides with the red rays.