  In 1844, the Austrian mineralogist Wilhelm von Haidinger reported he could
see the polarization of light with the naked eye. It appears as a faint,
blurry, transient, yellow hourglass shape superimposed on whatever one looks
at. It is now commonly called Haidinger's brushes. To our surprise, even though
the paper is well cited, we were unable to find a translation of it from its
difficult, nineteenth-century German into English. We provide one, with
annotations to set the paper into its scientific and historical context.
