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Look at the boat knot, where the hitch is made in the rope itself; and the sheet bend toggle, where the ends of two ropes are attached together to a standard or cleat. Thus the conversation drifted from one subject to another, covering a variety of interesting topics. George reminded the Professor that he had not yet explained to them what the spectroscope was, and its uses.
And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world.
Yet these felicities of explanation must not make us forget that the chemical composition attributed to the first type of cometary trains has, so far, received no countenance from the spectroscope. The emission lines of free, incandescent hydrogen have never been derived from any part of these bodies.
Ordinary incandescent vapours from highly heated substances give discontinuous spectra, i.e. spectra in which the rays of coloured light are quite limited, and they appear in the spectroscope only as lines of the breadth of the slit.
Moreover, the stars are shown by the spectroscope to consist of chemical elements identical with those which are found in the solar system. Such facts as these make it probable that the career of other stars, when adequately inquired into, would be found to be like that of our own sun.
Whence this energy and this ether proceed is not the subject of physical analysis. That is a question which cannot be answered by means of the vacuum tube or the spectroscope.
The principles of mathematics are everywhere applicable; gravitation controls all the worlds and every particle of matter in every one of them, and the spectroscope assures us that the same chemical elements which constitute our world are found in the farthest star. "On every hand," says Walker, "we are assured that the guiding principle of Science is that of the uniformity of nature."
Equally indecisive information was derived from the spectroscope. To Vogel, Hasselberg, and Young, the light of the "Nova" seemed perfectly continuous; but Huggins caught traces of bright lines on September 2, confirmed on the 9th; and Copeland succeeded, on September 30, in measuring three bright bands with an acute-angled prism specially constructed for the purpose.
"The applicability of the spectroscope to the differentiation of various substances is too well known to need explanation. Its value lies in the exact nature of the evidence furnished. Even the very dilute solution which I have been able to make of the material scraped from these spots gives characteristic absorption bands between the D and E lines, as they are called.
When the spectroscope was first applied to finding the composition of the heavenly bodies, there was a great desire to find out what comets are made of. The first opportunity came in 1864, when Donati observed the spectrum of a comet, and saw three bright bands, thus proving that it was a gas and at least partly self-luminous.
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