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Discernible with optical aid early in May, it was on June 5 observed on the meridian at Albany just before noon an astronomical event of extreme rarity. Comet Wells, however, never became an object so conspicuous as to attract general attention, owing to its immersion in the evening twilight of our northern June. But the study of its spectrum revealed new facts of the utmost interest.
Indeed, there are a few small stars which afford a spectrum of bright lines instead of dark ones, and this we know denotes a gaseous or vaporized state of things, from which it maybe inferred that such orbs are in a different condition from most of their relations.
Once available for study under electrical excitation in vacuum tubes, helium was found to have many other lines in its spectrum, which have been identified in the spectra of solar prominences, gaseous nebulæ, and hot stars. Indeed, there is a stellar class known as helium stars, because of the dominance of this gas in their atmospheres.
Absorption Spectra. The ordinary form of comparison spectrum cannot be employed on account of the absence of a slit. The most promising method of determining the wave lengths of the stellar spectra is to interpose some absorbent medium. Experiments are in progress with hyponitric fumes and other substances.
See's elimination of irradiative effects by means of daylight measures, executed at Washington in 1901. The visual spectrum of this planet was first examined by Father Secchi in 1869, and later, with more advantages for accuracy, by Huggins, Vogel, and Keeler. It is a very remarkable one.
Science finds that nature prefers this number; light under analysis reveals seven colors, and all colors refer to the seven orders of the solar spectrum; the human voice has seven tones that constitute the scale of sound; the human body is renewed every seven years.
Thus Professor Stark attributes to them, with experiments in proof of his opinion, the emission of the spectra of the rays in Geissler tubes, and the complexity of the spectrum discloses the complexity of the centre. Besides, certain peculiarities in the conductivity of metals cannot be explained without a supposition of this kind.
Yet this need occasion no surprise when we remember that the Fraunhofer spectrum integrates the absorption of multitudinous strata, various in density and composition, while only the upper section of the formation comes within view of the sensitive plates exposed at totalities, the low-lying vaporous beds being necessarily covered by the moon.
That is, the two processes bringing about the relevant phenomena are not confined to the part of space which these phenomena seem to occupy; for the whole positive and negative realms of the universe share in them. Hence the spectrum, though apparently bounded at its two ends, proves by its very nature to be part of a greater whole.
I must first of all appeal to what every one who frequents this theater is so accustomed, viz., the spectrum. I am going not to put it in the large and splendid stripe of the most gorgeous colors before you, with which you are so well acquainted, but my spectrum will take a more modest form of purer colors, some twelve inches in length. I would ask you to notice which color is most luminous.
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