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Ah, dear brethren! men are telling us now that there is no connection between earth and heaven except such as telescopes and spectroscopes can make out.
These have multiplied to such a degree that some of our observatories are literally physical laboratories, in which the sun and stars are examined by powerful spectroscopes and other optical instruments that have recently advanced our knowledge of physics by leaps and bounds.
"Ebulae," he might say; "yes, they were a specialty of mine; but swarms of meteors I know nothing of these. And 'spectroscopes, 'photographs' what, pray, are these? In my day there were no such words or things as spectroscope and photograph; to my mind these words convey no meaning." But why go farther? These imaginings suffice to point a moral that he who runs may read.
"She's leaking air and water vapor like crazy." "Well, is she a good guy or a bad guy?" Morland was yelling back, as though Koreff's spectroscopes could distinguish. Koreff ignored that. "Another ship making signal," he said. "She's the one coming up over the equator. Sword-World impulse code; her communication-screen combination, and an identify-yourself."
Its telescopes, especially designed with the aims of the physicist and chemist in view, bring images of sun, stars, nebulæ, and other heavenly bodies within the reach of powerful spectroscopes, sensitive bolometers and thermopiles, and the long array of other appliances available for the measurement and analysis of radiation.
"If all were forced to till the soil, those vast results would not have been attained which have been attained in our day; there would have been none of those striking successes which have so greatly augmented man's power over nature, were it not for these astronomical discoveries which are so astounding to the mind of man, and which have added to the security of navigation; there would be no steamers, no railways, none of those wonderful bridges, tunnels, steam-engines and telegraphs, photography, telephones, sewing-machines, phonographs, electricity, telescopes, spectroscopes, microscopes, chloroform, Lister's bandages, and carbolic acid."
In our time that finger has multiplied itself into ten thousand thousand implements of research, challenging all mysteries, weighing the world as in a balance, and sifting through its prisms and spectroscopes the light that comes from the throne of the Eternal. Pity us, dear Lord, pity us! The peace in believing which belonged to other ages is not for us.
It is probable, if not certain, that our earth is a mass that has only cooled down on the surface, the centre being still hot and to some extent, at any rate, molten; and in the sun we have the case of an enormous globe surrounded with a photosphere, as it is called a blaze of incandescent substances, which our spectroscopes tell us are substances such as we have on earth now in cooled or condensed condition iron, oxygen, hydrogen, and other such forms of matter.
Of Thalèn's original list of seventy rays common to several spectra, very few resisted Thollon's and Young's powerful spectroscopes; and the process of resolution was completed by Rowland. Thus the argument from community of lines to community of substance has virtually collapsed. It was replaced by one founded on certain periodical changes on the spectra of sun-spots.
Every large sunspot contains a magnetic field covering many thousands of square miles, within which the spectrum lines of iron, manganese, chromium, titanium, vanadium, calcium, and other metallic vapors are so powerfully affected that their widening and splitting can be seen with telescopes and spectroscopes of moderate size.
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