By this capillary action water may be transferred to the upper layers of the soil from a depth of several feet below the surface.
It is easy to show that a force subject to this law would not account for capillary action.
Capillarity and Surface Tension.-Reference should be made to the article Capillary Action for the general discussion of this phenomenon of liquids.
Laplace was, moreover, the first to offer a complete analysis of capillary action based upon a definite hypothesis - that of forces "sensible only at insensible distances"; and he made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to explain the phenomena of light on an identical principle.
In like manner we may by experiment ascertain the general fact that the surface of a liquid is in a state of tension similar to that of a membrane stretched equally in all directions, and prove that this tension depends only on the nature and temperature of the liquid and not on its form, and from this as a secondary physical principle we may deduce all the phenomena of capillary action.
