The luminous body which here acts is circumscribed: the sun, while it shines and diffuses light, is still an insulated object. However small the opening in the lid of a camera obscura be made, still the whole image of the sun will penetrate it. The light which streams from all parts of the sun's disk, will cross itself in the smallest opening, and form the angle which corresponds with the sun's apparent diameter. On the outside we have a cone narrowing to the orifice; within, this apex spreads again, producing on an opposite surface a round image, which still increases in size in proportion to the distance of the recipient surface from the apex. This image, together with all other objects of the external landscape, appears reversed on the white surface in question in a dark room.
310.
How little therefore we have here to do with single sun-rays, bundles or fasces of rays, cylinders of rays, pencils, or whatever else of the kind may be imagined, is strikingly evident. For the convenience of certain diagrams the sun-light may be assumed to arrive in parallel lines, but it is known that this is only a fiction; a fiction quite allowable where the difference between the assumption and the true appearance is unimportant; but we should take care not to suffer such a postulate to be equivalent to a fact, and proceed to further operations on such a fictitious basis.
311.
Let the aperture in the window-shutter be now enlarged at pleasure, let it be made round or square, nay, let the whole shutter be opened, and let the sun shine into the room through the whole window; the space which the sun illumines will always be larger according to the angle which its diameter makes; and thus even the whole space illumined by the sun through the largest window is only the image of the sun plus the size of the opening. We shall hereafter have occasion to return to this.
312 (199).