Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/489

Rh to low temperatures. If I have a transparent body and allow light sent out by a body giving a continuous spectrum to fall through it, I often observe that the transparent body sifts out of the light falling through it certain kind of rays. Spectra are thus produced which are called absorption spectra, because the body which is under examination does not send out any light, but absorbs some vibrations which are made to pass through it. It is an important fact that a molecule absorbs just the rays which it is capable itself of sending out. I can therefore investigate the spectrum of a body just as well by means of the absorption it produces as by means of the light which it sends out.

Vapors like bromine or iodine examined in this way give us a spectrum of fluted bands. A powerful spark in these gases gives, however, a line-spectrum. Here, then, a change of spectrum has taken place. The same body at different temperatures gives us a different spectrum, and the change which takes place is the same as that observed in the spectrum of a compound body the moment the temperature has risen sufficiently to decompose that body. I conclude from spectroscopic observations, therefore, that the molecules of bromine and iodine just above their boiling-point are complex molecules, which are broken up at the temperature of the electric spark. At high temperatures the molecules of these bodies contain a smaller number of atoms, and it follows from this that the gases must be lighter or that their density must be smaller. These conclusions, which on spectroscopic grounds have been definite and clear for some years, have recently, by independent methods, been confirmed by Victor Meyer and others. It has been directly proved that at high temperatures the molecules of iodine and bromine contain a smaller number of atoms than they do just above their boiling-point. In other cases the change of density has not been directly proved, only because these necessary measurements are difficult or even impossible at very high temperatures, but we may be perfectly sure that chlorine, as well as the metallic vapors of silver, sodium, potassium, etc., which show an analogous change of their spectra, will ultimately be proved to undergo a change of density at high temperatures.

As we can trace the change from a line-spectrum to a band-spectrum taking place simultaneously with an increase of density, so may we follow the change from a band-spectrum to a continuous spectrum indicating the formation of a molecule still more complex.

Sulphur-vapor, at a temperature just above its boiling-point, contains three times the number of atoms in one molecule that it does at a temperature of 1,000° Centigrade. The spectrum of sulphur-vapor observed by absorption is continuous when the heavier molecule only is present. At the higher temperatures, when each molecule is decomposed into three, the spectrum belongs to the type of fluted bandspectra. From the cases in which we can thus prove the change in the spectra and in the densities to go on simultaneously, we are