CHAPTER XII - STARS AND NEBULÆ

Summary

That a science of stellar chemistry should not only have become possible, but should already have made material advances, is assuredly one of the most amazing features in the swift progress of knowledge our age has witnessed. Custom can never blunt the wonder with which we must regard the achievement of compelling rays emanating from a source devoid of sensible magnitude through immeasurable distance, to reveal, by its peculiarities, the composition of that source. The discovery of revolving double stars assured us that the great governing force of the planetary movements, and of our own material existence, sways equally the courses of the farthest suns in space; the application of prismatic analysis certified to the presence in the stars of the familiar materials, no less of the earth we tread, than of the bodies built up out of its dust and circumambient vapours.

We have seen that, as early as 1823, Fraunhofer ascertained the generic participation of stellar light in the peculiarity by which sunlight, spread out by transmission through a prism, shows numerous transverse rulings of interrupting darkness. No sooner had Kirchhoff supplied the key to the hidden meaning of those ciphered characters, than it was eagerly turned to the interpretation of the dim scrolls unfolded in the spectra of the stars. Donati made at Florence, in 1860, the first efforts in this direction; but with little result, owing to the imperfections of the instrumental means at his command.