The Hypothesis of Le Bel and Van't Hoff

Extract

Arago observed in 1811 that if a plane polarised ray of light be passed vertically through a plate of quartz cut at right angles to the crystallographic axis, the ray emerges plane polarised but with its plane of polarisation inclined at an angle to the original plane of polarisation, this angle (or the amount of rotation of the plane of polarisation about the direction of the ray) being proportional to the thickness of the plate. Biot further showed that in some quartz crystals this rotation is in one sense, in others in the opposite. In 1821 Herschel proved that the sense of this rotation was connected with the inclination of the so-called plagiedral faces to the faces of the prism. In 1830 Naumann gave a very complete account of the crystallography of quartz, showed that the two kinds of crystals are mirror images of each other, and gave to this relation the name of Enantiomorphism.