Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/405

 the sun rose unobscured, and, as soon as he had completed the necessary adjustments, and directed his instrument to the portion of the sun's limb where the day before the most brilliant prominence appeared, the same lines came out again, clear and bright; and now, of course, there was no difficulty in determining at leisure, and with almost absolute accuracy, their position in the spectrum. He immediately confirmed his first conclusion, that hydrogen is the most conspicuous component of the prominences, but found that the yellow line must be referred to some different element than sodium, being somewhat more refrangible then the D lines.

He found also that, by slightly moving his telescope and causing the image of the sun's limb to take different positions with reference to the slit of his spectroscope, he could even trace out the form and measure the dimensions of the prominences; and he remained at his station for several days, engaged in these novel and exceedingly interesting observations.

Of course, he immediately sent home a report of his eclipse-work, and of his new discovery, but, as his station at Guntoor, in Eastern India, was farther from mail communication with Europe than those upon the western coast of the peninsula, his letter did not reach France until some week or two after the accounts of the other observers; when it did arrive, it came to Paris, in company with a communication from Mr. Lockyer, announcing the same discovery, made independently, and even more creditably, since with Mr. Lockyer it was not suggested by any thing he had seen, but was thought out from fundamental principles.

Nearly two years previously the idea had occurred to him (and, indeed, to others also, though he was the first to publish it), that if the protuberances are gaseous, so as to give a spectrum of bright lines, those lines ought to be visible in a spectroscope of sufficient power, even in broad daylight. The principle is simply this:

Under ordinary circumstances the protuberances are invisible, for the same reason as the stars, in the daytime: they are hidden by the intense light reflected from the particles of our own atmosphere near the sun's place in the sky, and, if we could only sufficiently weaken this aërial illumination, without at the same time weakening their light, the end would be gained. And the spectroscope accomplishes precisely this very thing. Since the air-light is reflected sunshine, it of course presents the same spectrum as sunlight, a continuous band of color crossed by dark lines. Now, this sort of spectrum is greatly weakened by every increase of dispersive power, because the light is spread out into a longer ribbon and made to cover a more extended area. On the other hand, a spectrum of bright lines undergoes no such weakening by an increase in the dispersive power of the spectroscope. The bright lines are only more widely separated—not in the least diffused or shorn of their brightness. If, then, the image of the sun, formed by