Abstract
LORD RAYLEIGH, in NATURE, December 19, 1912, has again returned to the subject of breath figures, and his criticisms of my work on that subject call for some remarks. Lord Rayleigh holds that clean glass will give a uniform deposit of dew when breathed on, and will look black, to use his expression, and show the colours of thin plates when property lighted. I, on the other hand, think that the character of the deposit is generally determined by the impurities on the surface of the glass, because the appearance of the deposit depends very much on the treatment the surface may have previously received. I came to this conclusion because there seems to be no way of finding out what the deposit is like on clean glass, as we have no means of knowing whether the surface is clean or not.
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AITKEN, J. Breath Figures. Nature 90, 619–621 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/090619c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/090619c0
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