Pleasant Ways in Science

The most promising result of solar research since Kirchhoff in 1859 interpreted the dark lines of the sun’s spectrum has recently been announced from America. Interesting in itself, the discovery just made is doubly interesting in what it seems to promise in the future. Just as Kirchhoff’s great discovery, that a certain double dark line in the solar spectrum is due to the vapour of sodium in the sun’s atmosphere, was but the first of a long series of results which the spectroscopic analysis of the sun was to reveal, so the discovery just announced that a certain important gas—the oxygen present in our air and the chief chemical constituent of water—shows its presence in the sun by bright lines instead of dark, will in all probability turn out to be but the firstfruits of a new method of examining the solar spectrum. As its author, Dr. Henry Draper, of New York, remarks, further investigation in the direction he has pursued will lead to the discovery of other elements in the sun, but it was not “proper to conceal, for the sake of personal advantage, the principle on which such researches are to be conducted.” It may well happen, though I anticipate otherwise, that by thus at once describing his method of observation, Dr. Draper may enable others to add to the list of known solar elements some which yet remain to be detected; but if Dr. Draper should thus have added but one element to that list, he will ever be regarded as the physicist to whose acumen the method was due by which all were detected, and to whom, therefore, the chief credit of their discovery must certainly be attributed.

I propose briefly to consider the circumstances which preceded the great discovery which it is now my pleasing duty to describe, in order that the reader may the more readily follow the remarks by which I shall endeavour to indicate some of the results which seem to follow from the discovery, as well as the line along which, in my opinion, the new method may most hopefully be followed.