rd's air of deference, and the respectful looks of
the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but
he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and
laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently
learned to my surprise and amusement that the amiable confederate of
the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in
fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the
initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has
long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a
ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and
narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had
either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant.
Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club,
detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another
according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world
became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun,
and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be analysed or
spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning
there in the immensely distant spaces. We can know what constitutes
a star as unerringly as we know the constituents of the earth. Still
more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had
reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism
to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division.
In fact here was a method of chemical and physical analysis, much more
powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and
the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe
deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of
students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate
features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were
a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand,
the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the
apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I
stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture
toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the
depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a
tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is
interesting to think that for a moment once