396 General Monthly Meeting. [Ju^y 1 > 



essay on these bands ; Van der Willigen, and more recently Pliicker, 

 have given us beautiful drawings of the spectra, obtained from the 

 discharge of Ruhmkorff 's coil. But none of these distinguished men 

 betrayed the least knowledge of the connection between the bright 

 bands of the metals and the dark lines of the solar spectrum. The 

 man who came nearest to the philosophy of the subject, was Angstrom. 

 In a paper translated from Poggendorff's " Annalen " by* myself, and 

 published in the "Philosophical Magazine" for 1855, he indicates that 

 the rays which a body absorbs are precisely those which it can emit 

 when rendered luminous. In another place, he speaks of one of his 

 spectra giving the general impression of reversal of the solar spectrum, 

 Foucault, Stokes, and Thomson, have all been very close to the dis- 

 covery ; and, for my own part, the examination of the radiation and 

 absorption of heat by gases and vapours, some of the results of which 

 I placed before you at the commencement of this discourse, would 

 have led me in 1859 to the law on which all KirchhofF's speculations 

 are founded, had not an accident withdrawn me from the investigation. 

 But KirchhofTs claims are unaffected by these circumstances. True, 

 much that I have referred to formed the necessary basis of his dis- 

 covery ; so did the laws of Kepler furnish to Newton the basis of the 

 theory of gravitation. But what Kirchhoff has done carries us far 

 beyond all that had before been accomplished. He has introduced the 

 order of law amid a vast assemblage of empirical observations, and 

 has ennobled our previous knowledge by showing its relationship to 

 some of the most sublime of natural phenomena. 



[J. T.] 



GENERAL MONTHLY MEETING, 



Monday, July 1, 1861. 



William Pole, Esq. M.A. F.R.S. Treasurer and Vice-President, 

 in the Chair. 



William Beckett, Esq. 

 * Alexander John Ellis, Esq. 



Hardinge Giffard, Esq. and 

 Joseph Neuberg, Esq. 



were elected Members of the Royal Institution. 



John Dobie, Esq. 



W. H. Stone, Esq. and 



John Wells Wainwright, M.D. 



were admitted Members of the Royal Institution. 



