Excerpt from The Science of Light<br><br>This book is intended as a companion to that on Radiation previously published in this same series, and the first three chapters in that book should be read before commencing this.<br><br>Light plays such an important part in the life of man that it is only natural that speculation as to its nature and investigation of its laws should have begun very early. But although this is true, yet the ancients seem to have been exceedingly slow in the invention and construction of optical instruments, and to have been completely innocent of any reasonable optical theory. All the refinements both of construction and theory have happened well within the last three centuries.<br><br>Metallic mirrors are, of course, very ancient. Many of them have been recovered from ancient Egyptian tombs, and they are very distinctly mentioned in the books of Exodus and Job. Burning-glasses in the form of globes of water or of glass were also known at a very early time, Aristophanes mentioning them in a comedy of his which was performed in 424 b.c.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.