Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/334

320 by imperfection in our methods of nomenclature, the confusion in this respect becoming, as we all too well know, every day worse and worse.

And now, while we have accomplished only a most imperfect examination of objects that we find on the earth, see how, on a sudden, through the vista that has been opened by the spectroscope, what a prospect lies beyond us in the heavens! I often look at the bright-yellow ray emitted from the chromosphere of the sun, by that unknown element, Helium, as the astronomers have ventured to call it. It seems trembling with excitement to tell its story, and how many unseen companions it has. And if this be the case with the sun, what shall we say of the magnificent hosts of the stars? May not every one of them have special elements of its own? Is not each a chemical laboratory in itself? Look at the cluster in the sword-handle of Perseus; in Cassiopeia, a universe of stars on a ground of star-dust; in Hercules—of which, as astronomers say, no one can look at for the first time through a great telescope without a shout of wonder—the most superb spectacle that the eye of man can witness! Look at the double stars of which so many are now known, emitting their contrasting rays, garnet, or ruby, or emerald, or sapphire. Each is in accordance with its own special physical conditions, though all are under the same universal ordinance.

Now, here a fact of surpassing importance presses itself on our attention. The movements taking place in those distant bodies are taking place under the same laws that prevail here on earth, and in our solar system. The law of gravitation, as developed by Newton, bears sway in all those distant worlds. In them bodies attract each other with forces directly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances. There the laws of the emission, absorption, and transmission of light are the same as they are with us. There ignited hydrogen gives forth its three rays, the same rays that it gives forth to us. In the uttermost parts of the universe the law of definite combination, the numerical law, and the multiple law, stand good. Sodium absorbs its two waves of definite refrangibility, and iron gives in the spectra its more than a hundred lines, more than a hundred silent but convincing witnesses of the uniformity of the constitution of the universe. There the number of vibrations that constitute a ray of definite refrangibility is the same we have found it to be here. In the enormous heat of those central suns the dissociation of molecules may be of a higher order than we can reach artificially, but the law under which it takes place is a continuation of the law here. There, though the weight of a given mass of matter is different from what it is with us, it is nevertheless determined by the law that determines here—the law of gravitation. There energy is indestructible, and is measured as it is measured among us, by work. Then is there any boundary that we can assign to natural law—is it not omnipresent, universal?