The attempts of popularizers who endeavour to represent, in all their
details, the mechanism of the electric phenomena, thus appear vain
enough, and even puerile. It is useless to find out to what material
body the ether may be compared, if we content ourselves with seeing in
it a medium of which, at every point, two vectors define the
properties.
For a long time, therefore, we could remark that the theory of Fresnel
simply supposed a medium in which something periodical was propagated,
without its being necessary to admit this something to be a movement;
but we had to wait not only for Maxwell, but also for Hertz, before
this idea assumed a really scientific shape. Hertz insisted on the
fact that the six equations of the electric field permit all the
phenomena to be anticipated without its being necessary to construct
one hypothesis or another, and he put these equations into a very
symmetrical form, which brings completely in evidence the perfect
reciprocity between electrical and magnetic actions. He did yet more,
for he brought to the ideas of Maxwell the most striking confirmation
by his memorable researches on electric oscillations.
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