Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/739

Rh by M. Becquerel with every plate tried and with collodions containing different quantities of chlorophyll.

It must be admitted, then, that a film exerting selective absorption in intimate contact with a sensitive film of silver bromide or iodide affects the latter in those parts of the spectrum where the selective action is taking place. Here, surely, is a wide field for investigation, and one the importance of which will be at once obvious to the physicist. Practically also, when the precise conditions of action are made known, valuable results may be anticipated from the application of this principle to science and to art. Since the year 1842, when M. Becquerel photographed the whole solar spectrum from the extreme violet to the extreme red, and when Dr. J. W. Draper photographed the violet, blue, and extreme red, no successful attempts have been made to imprint the least refrangible end of the spectrum; and this, when we consider the great importance that the study of the solar spectrum has assumed of late years, and the painful or even dangerous character of prolonged eye-observation, is to us a matter of wonder. M. Becquerel's result, it will be remembered, was obtained by a film of silver iodide, first insolated or exposed to diffused light and then to the action of the spectrum. Here, again, is another question—the precise action of insolation on sensitive plates—demanding explanation at the hands of the physicist. The practical aspect of Dr. Vogel's discovery need not here be discussed at length. Attention may be called to the well-known difficulty of getting reds or yellows to imprint themselves in portraiture, a difficulty which now bids fair to be overcome.

Then, again, in what we must consider as a higher sphere of practical utility, great advantage to the study of solar physics is likely to accrue. In point of fact, the photographic method of comparing spectra described in a recent communication to the Royal Society now becomes available for the whole extent of the solar spectrum, and our knowledge of the true composition of the sun will be thus in course of time recorded permanently on “that retina which never forgets.”

Great results have already been achieved by photography, and greater may be looked for. It must not be forgotten that in this most interesting branch of chemical physics we are in a period either of provisional hypothesis, or, worse still, of no hypothesis at all, so that valuable additions to our knowledge of physical and chemical laws should be forthcoming. The changes wrought by a beam of light on sensitive surfaces are sometimes physical and sometimes chemical. We may appropriately recall here the fact that mechanical pressure upon a sensitized surface of a silver salt acts in the same manner as a ray of light, giving a dark stain under the action of reducing agents. The experiment of Grove also, in which an electric current is set up by the incidence of a beam of light upon a prepared Daguerreotype plate, should not be forgotten. The equivalence