The principles and methods of geometrical optics : especially as applied to the theory of optical instruments / by James P. C. Southall.

  • Southall, James P. C. (James Powell Cocke), 1871-1962.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The principles and methods of geometrical optics : especially as applied to the theory of optical instruments / by James P. C. Southall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    11/702 (page 5)
    PREFACE. From time to time, almost like # voice crying in the wilderness, some one is heard to lament the apathy with which Geometrical Optics is regarded in this country and in England;1 although it is sufficient merely to call the roll of such names as Barrow, Newton, Cotes, Smith, Blair, Young, Airy, Hamilton, Herschel, Rayleigh, etc., in order to be reminded that this domain of science was once at any rate within the sphere of British influence. At present, however, it can hardly be gainsaid that the great province of applied optics is almost exclusively German territory; so that not only is it a fact that nearly all of the extraordinary developments of modern times in both the theory and construction of optical instruments are of German origin, but it is equally true also that until at least quite recently2 there was actually no treatise on Optics in the English language where the student could find, for example, hardly so much as a reference to the remarkable theories of Petzval, Seidel and Abbe—to mention only such names as are inseparably associated with the theory of optical imagery. Partly with the object of supplying this deficiency, and partly also in the hope (if I may venture to express it) of rekindling among the English-speaking nations interest in a study not only abundantly worthy for its own sake and undeservedly neglected, but still capable, under good cultivation, of yielding results of far-reaching deferring to Czapski's Theory of Optical Instruments (the first edition of which was published in 1893) and to the volume on Optics in the ninth (1895) edition of Mueller- Pouillet's Physics, Professor Silvanus P. Thompson, in the preface of his valuable translation of Dr. O. Lummer's Contributions to Photographic Optics (London, 1900), writes as follows: Both these works are in German, and most unfortunately no translation of either has appeared—most unfortunately, for there is no English work in optics that is at all com- parable to either of these. I say so deliberately, in spite of the admirable article by Lord Rayleigh on 'Optics' in the Encyclopcedia Britannica, in spite of the existence of those excellent treatises, Heath's Geometrical Optics, and Preston's Theory of Light. No doubt such books as Heath's Geometrical Optics and Parkinson's Optics are good in their way. They serve admirably to get up the subject for the Tripos; but they are far too academic, and too remote from the actual modern applications. In fact, the science of the best optical instrument-makers is far ahead of the science of the text-books. The article of Sir John Herschel 'On Light' in the Encyclopcedia Metropolitana of 1840 marks the culminating point of English writers on optics. 2H. Dennis Taylor's A System of Applied Optics (London, 1906) is a most valuable work by the inventor of the celebrated Cooke lenses for photography.