Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/672

652 It is true we can see these in the visible spectrum, but you remember we propose to explore the invisible also, and since to this the dark is the same as the light, it will feel absorption lines in the infra-red which might remain otherwise unknown.

I have spent a long time in these preliminary researches; in indirect methods for determining the absorption of our atmosphere, and in experiments and calculations which I do not detail, but it is so often supposed that scientific investigation is a sort of happy guessing, and so little is realized of the labor of preparation and proof, that I have been somewhat particular in describing the essential parts of the apparatus finally employed, and now we must pass to the scene of their use.

We have been compared to creatures living at the bottom of the sea, who frame their deceptive traditional notions of what the sun is like from the feeble changed rays which sift down to them. Though such creatures could not rise to the surface, they might swim up toward it; and, if these rays grew hotter, brighter, and bluer as they ascended, it would be almost within the capacity of a fish's mind to guess that they are still brighter and bluer at the top.

Since we children of the earth, while dwelling on it, are always at the bottom of the sea, though of another sort, the most direct method of proof I spoke of is merely to group as far as we can and observe what happens, though as we are men, and not fishes, something more may fairly be expected of our intelligence than of theirs.

We will not only guess, but measure and reason, and in particular we will first, while still at the bottom of the mountain, draw the light and heat out into a spectrum, and analyze every part of it by some method that will enable us to explore the invisible as well as record the visible. Then we will ascend many miles into the air, meeting the rays on the way down, before the sifting process has done its whole work, and there analyze the light all over again, so as to be able to learn the different proportions in which the different rays have been absorbed, and, by studying the action on each separate ray, to prove the state of things which must have existed before this sifting—this selective absorption—began.

It may seem at first that we can not ascend far enough to do much good, since the surface of our aërial ocean is hundreds of miles overhead; but we must remember that the air grows thinner as we ascend, the lower atmosphere being so much denser that about one half the whole substance or mass of it lies within the first four miles, which is a less height than the tops of some mountains. Every high mountain, however, will not do, for ours must not only be very high but very steep, so that the station we choose at the bottom may be almost under the station we are afterward to occupy at the top.

Besides, we are not going to climb a lofty, lonely summit like tourists to spend an hour, but to spend weeks; so that we must have