EXPERIMENTS ON THE ETHER with an appropriate zenith-sector full of water. Stars were seen through the water-telescope precisely as through an air telescope. A nega- tive result again! (The theory is fully dealt with in Chapter X and Appendix 3.) Stellar observations, however, are un- necessarily difficult. Fresnel had pointed out that a terrestrial source of light would do just as well. He had also (being a man of exceeding genius) predicted that nothing would happen. Hoek has now tried it in a perfect manner and nothing did happen. But these facts are not at all disconcerting; they are just what ought to be anticipated, in the light of true theory. The absence of all effect caused by stagnant dense matter inserted in the path of a beam of light, that is of dense transpar- ent matter not artificially moved with reference to the earth—or rather with reference to source and receiver—is explicable on Fresnel's theory concerning the behaviour of ether inside matter. If the index of refraction of the matter is called p, that means that the speed of light inside it is ath of the speed outside orin vacuo. And that is only another way of saying that the virtual etherial density inside it is represented by ,’, since the velocity of waves is inversely as the square root of the density of the medium which conveys them, the elasticity being reckoned as constant, and the same inside as out, 59