The Impact of Drops on Liquid Surfaces and the Underwater Noise of Rain

There will be but few of my readers who have not, in some heavy shower of rain, beguiled the tedium of enforced waiting by watching, perhaps half-unconsciously, the thousand little crystal fountains that start from the surface of pool or river; noting now and then a surrounding coronet of lesser jets, or here and there a bubble that floats for a moment and then vanishes. It is to this apparently insignificant transaction, which always has been and always will be so familiar, and to others of a like nature, that I desire to call the attention of those who are interested in natural phenomena; hoping to share with them some of the delight that I have myself felt, in contemplating the exquisite forms that the camera has revealed, and in watching the progress of a multitude of events, compressed indeed within the limits of a few hundredths of a second, but none the less orderly and inevitable, and of which the sequence is in part easy to anticipate and understand, while in part it taxes the highest mathematical powers to elucidate.