Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/669

Rh atmosphere between the lamp and the screen absorb, it is not enough to show.

Our spectrum, as it appears before absorption, might be compared to an army divided into numerous brigades, each wearing a distinct uniform, one red, one green, one blue, so that all the colors are represented each by its own body. If, to represent the light absorbed as it progresses, we supposed that the army advances under a fire which thins its numbers, we should have to consider that (to give the case of nature) this destructive fire was directed chiefly against those divisions which were dressed in blue, or allied colors, so that the army was thinned out unequally, many men in blue being killed off for one in red, and that by the time it has advanced a certain distance under fire the proportion of the men in each brigade has been altered, the red being comparatively unhurt. Almost all absorption is thus selective in its action, and often in an astonishing degree, killing off, so to speak, certain rays in preference to others, as though by an intelligent choice, and destroying most, not only of certain divisions (to continue our illustration), but even picking out certain files in each company. Every ray, then, has its own individuality, and on this I can not too strongly insist; for just as two men retain their personalities under the same red uniform, and one may fall and the other survive, though they touch shoulders in the ranks, so in the spectrum certain parts will be blotted out by absorption, while others next to them may escape.

To illustrate this selective absorption, I put a piece of didymium glass in the path of the ray. It will, of course, absorb some of the light, but, instead of dimming the whole spectrum, we might almost say it has arbitrarily chosen to select one narrow part for action, in this particular case choosing a narrow file near the orange, and letting all the rest go unharmed. In this arbitrary way our atmosphere operates, but in a far more complex manner, taking out a narrow file here and another there, in hundreds of places, all through the spectrum, but on the whole much the most in the blue, the Fraunhofer lines being merely part of the evidence of this wonderful quasi-intelligent action which bears the name of selective absorption.

Before we leave this spectrum, let us recall one most important matter. We know that here beyond the red is solar energy in the form of heat which we can not see, but not on that account any less important. More than half the whole power of the sun is here invisible, and, if we are to study completely the action of our atmosphere, we shall have to pay great attention to this part, and find out some way of determining the loss in it, which will be difficult, for the ultra red end is not only invisible, but compressed, the red end being shut up like the closed pages of a book, as you may notice by comparing the narrowness of the red with the width of the blue.

Now, refraction by a prism is not the only way of forming a spectrum. Nature furnishes us color not only from the rainbow, but from