Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/670

650 non-transparent substances like mother-of-pearl, where the iridescent hues are due to microscopically fine lines. Art has lately surpassed Nature in these wonderful "gratings," consisting of pieces of polished metal, in which we see at first nothing to account for the splendid play of color apparently pouring out from them like light from an opal, but which, on examination with a powerful microscope, show lines so narrow that there are from fifty to one hundred in the thickness of a fine human hair, and all spaced with wonderful precision.

This grating is equal in defining power to many such prisms as we have just been looking at, but its light does not show well upon the screen. You will see, however, that its spectrum differs from that of the prism, in that in this case the red end is expanded, as compared with the violet, and the invisible ultra-red is expanded still more, so that this will be the best means for us to use in exploring that "dark continent" of invisible heat found not only in the spectrum of the sun, but of the electric light, and of all incandescent bodies, and of whose existence we already know from Herschel and Tyndall.

Now, we can not reproduce the actual solar spectrum on the screen without the sun itself, but here are photographs of it, which show parts of the losses the different colors have suffered on their way to us. We have before us the well-known Fraunhofer lines, due, you remember, not only to absorption in the sun's atmosphere, but also to absorption in our own. We have been used to think of them in connection with their cause, one being due to the absorption of iron vapor in the sun, another to that of water-vapor in our own air, and so forth; but now I ask you to think of them only in connection with the fact that each is due to the absorption of some part of the original light, and that collectively they tell much of the story of what has happened to that light on its way down to us. Observe, for instance, how much thicker they lie in the blue end than in the red—another evidence of the great proportionate loss in the blue.

If we could restore all the lost light in these lines, we should get back partly to the original condition of things at the very fount, and, so far as our own air is concerned, that is what we are to ascend the mountain for—to see, by going up through nearly half of the atmosphere, what the rate of loss is in each ray by actual trial; then, knowing this rate, to be able to allow for the loss in the other part still above the mountain-top; and, finally, by recombining these rays, to get the loss as a whole. Remember, however, always, that the most important part of the solar energy is in the dark spectrum which we do not see, but which, if we could see, we should probably find to have numerous absorption-spaces in it corresponding to the Fraunhofer lines, but where heat has been stopped out rather than light. To make our research thorough, then, we ought not to trust to the eye only, or even chiefly, but have some way of investigating the whole spectrum; the invisible in which the sun's power chiefly lies,