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"Well, that's the most remarkable thing in all my professional experience," he exclaimed, resigning his place at the instrument to me. "What is?" I demanded, looking into the spectroscope, where I could distinguish several faint streaks of coloured light on a darker background.
Equipped with hammer, chisel, microscope, spectroscope and crucibles, he essayed the solution, undismayed by memories of his classics, of Sisyphus and Tantalus; seeing only the nodding poppies, the gilded primroses of his dancing goddess. Will he discover ere long, that a lesser riddle would have been to stand in the manufactory of the Faubourg St.
We do not have to depend upon the spectroscope for evidence that Venus has a dense atmosphere, for we can, in a manner, see her atmosphere, in consequence of its refractive action upon the sunlight that strikes into it near the edge of the planet's globe.
Why " the girl fluttered now, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform "why, we used to stand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going to be the longer. I'll wager mine are now!" With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving to catch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass of the spectroscope.
Here the refracting prism or the combination of prisms known as the "spectroscope" comes to its aid, teaching it to measure as well as to perceive. It furnishes, in a word, an accurate scale of colour.
At first men supposed that the great flame was made by a violent collision between two bodies coming together with great velocity so that both flared up, but this speculation has been shown by the spectroscope to be improbable, and now it is supposed by some people that two stars journeying through space may pass through a nebulous region, and thus may flare up, and such a theory is backed up by the fact that a very great number of such stars do seem to be mixed up in some strange way with a nebulous haze.
From the manner in which it moves, in the way the air of our own planet does in great storms, it is not easy to believe that it is a fluid, yet its sharply defined upper surface leads us to suppose that it can not well be a mere mass of vapour. The spectroscope shows us that this chromosphere contains in the state of vapour a number of metallic substances, such as iron and magnesium.
But what of the stars, proved by the spectroscope to be self-luminous, intensely hot, and formed of the same chemical elements that constitute the sun and the earth? Are they comparable in size with the sun? Do they occur in all stages of development, from infancy to old age?
The value of this method of observation was recognized at once, and, as soon as the spectroscope was perfected, the photographic method, in conjunction with its use, became invaluable to the chemist.
It was found, for example, that the spectroscope could detect the presence of a quantity of sodium so infinitesimal as the one two-hundred-thousandth of a grain. But what was even more important, the spectroscope put no limit upon the distance of location of the substance it tested, provided only that sufficient light came from it.