How did Isaac Newton’s particle theory describe light?

In his work Opticks, Isaac Newton proposed that light consists of a stream of material particles, or corpuscles, in motion. This model was rooted in his discovery that white light is a heterogeneous mixture of colors; he believed that individual rays of light possess immutable properties, which he interpreted as evidence of immutable particles of matter.12

To reconcile this particle theory with the known laws of refraction, Newton speculated that transparent media, such as glass, exert attractive forces on these particles. He hypothesized that particles of different colors have slightly different masses, causing them to travel at varying speeds within a medium and refract at distinct angles.1

Newton’s corpuscular theory was presented largely as a series of queries, perhaps reflecting his own ambivalence regarding the ultimate nature of light. While he viewed the theory as a speculative mechanical explanation, his immense scientific authority led the majority of the European scientific community to favor the particle model for over a century, until experimental evidence for the wave nature of light became overwhelming in the 19th century.13