PROFESSOR LOVERING'S ADDRESS. 207 



exempt from this liability. But, if, as modern science teaches, the 

 earth lives only by the triple radiation from the sun, then an earlier 

 doom has been written for the earth also. Geology is no longer 

 allowed to cut its garment from the past duration of unlimited extent. 

 The numerical estimates of physical science, with a large margin of 

 uncertainty, assign limits between which alone geology has free play. 

 Whatever tends to reduce or enlarge those limits must be of interest 

 to the geologist as well as to the astronomer. 



This is the brilliant career, in electricity, optics, astronomy, and 

 geology,. of the little mirror, cradled in the laboratory of PoggendorfF, 

 and which has not yet seen its fiftieth birthday. 



In making this exhibit of the instrumental appliances of modern 

 physics, I will simply name the polai-iscope, the stereoscope, and the 

 instruments in photography, and hurry on to the spectroscope. 



The steps by which the spectroscope has attained its preeminent 

 rank among the instruments of the physicist and the astronomer were 

 taken at long intervals. A whole century intervened between New- 

 ton's experiments with the prism and Wollaston's improvement. The 

 substitution of a long and narrow slit for the round hole in the window- 

 shutter was enough to reveal the presence of the two boldest dark 

 lines in the solar spectrum. Wollaston stood on the threshold of a 

 rich development in science, but neither he nor his compeers were 

 ready for it, and what he saw, novel as it was, attracted little atten- 

 tion. Spectrum analysis, in relation to light itself, began when Frauen- 

 hofer published, in 1817, in the memoirs of the Bavarian Academy, an 

 account of his experiments on the direct and reflected rays of the sun, 

 on starlight, and various artificial sources of light, dispersing the 

 rays by prisms of fine Munich glass and then receiving them into a 

 theodolite. Frauenhofer repeated some of his experiments in the 

 presence of the younger Herschel, but for many years he had the field 

 wholly to himself. A paper by Herschel on the colors of artificial 

 flames acquires a new interest from what has been done more recently. 

 Between 1830 and 1860, numerous physicists, among whom are the 

 well-known names of Brewster, Miller, Wheatstone, Powell, Stokes, 

 Gladstone, Becquerel, Masson, Van der Willigen, Plucker, and Ang- 

 strom, were at work upon the facts connected with the emission of 

 light by incandescent bodies and its absorption by gases and vapors. 

 As early as 1830, Simms had placed a lens in front of the prism, with 

 the slit in the focus, and another lens behind the prism to form an 

 image of the slit. 



The first hint of that pregnant fact, the reversal of the bright spec- 

 trum-bands of flames, came from Foucault in 1849. His experiment 

 was repeated at Paris, in 1850, in the presence of Sir William Thom- 

 son. It was reserved for a young physicist of Heidelberg, w T ho was 

 not born until seven years after Frauenhofer laid the foundations, to 

 place the keystone upon the structure on which many hands had 



