EXPERIMENTS ON THE ETHER A semi-transparent mirror set at 45° is em- ployed to split the beam, and a pair of normal and ordinary mirrors, set perpendicular to the two half beams, are employed to return them back whence they came, so that they can enter the eye through an observing telescope. It differs essentially from the interference kaleidoscope, Fig. 7, inasmuch as there is now no luminous path B C, and no contour enclosed by the light. Each half beam goes to and fro on its own path, and these paths, instead of being coincident, are widely separate—one north and south, for instance, and the other east and west. Under these conditions the bands are much more tremulous than they were in the arrange- ment of Fig, 7, and are subject to every kind of disturbance. The apparatus has to be ex- cessively steady, and no fluctuation even of temperature must be permitted in the path of either beam. To secure this, the source, the mirrors, and the observing telescope were all mounted upon a massive stone slab; and this was floated in a bath of mercury. The slab could then be slowly turned round, so that sometimes the path A B and sometimes the path A C lay approximately along or athwart the direction of the earth’s motion in space. And inasmuch as the motion along would take 65