SIR WILLIAM HUGGINS, K.C.B., O.M. 177 



was mounted for me equatorially and provided with a clock 

 motion by Mr, Cooke of York. 



" I soon became a little dissatisfied with the routine character 

 of ordinary astronomical work, and in a vague way sought about 

 in my mind for the possibility of research upon the heavens in a 

 new direction or by new methods. It was just at this time when 

 a vague longing after newer methods of observation for attacking 

 many of the problems of the heavenly bodies filled my mind, 

 that the news reached me of Kirchhoff's great discovery of the 

 true nature and the chemical constitution of the sun from the 

 interpretation of the Fraunhofer lines. 



" This news was to me like the coming upon a spring of 

 water in a dry and thirsty land. Here at last presented itself 

 the very order of work for which in an indefinite way I was 

 looking — namely, to extend his novel methods of research upon 

 the sun to the other heavenly bodies." 



If we look back to the old records, from Newton's time to 

 Kirchhoff's, it is a strange spasmodic history that unfolds itself; 

 and when we realise the absorbing interest that has been put 

 into the subject of the nature of light by the developments in 

 which Huggins played so large a part, we are struck by the 

 indirectness, even waywardness, of the line of advance. 



Newton himself was led to study the spectrum mainly by 

 his desire to fathom the causes of the poor results obtained 

 when lenses were used to form images. In his Optics, pub- 

 lished in 1675, he dealt with the nature of light and the 

 general features of refraction ; though he developed a method 

 of forming a pure spectrum, he never studied in close detail 

 the peculiarities of the spectrum ; at any rate he never recorded 

 any such studies. It was not till 1802 that the dark lines in 

 the solar spectrum were noted by Wollaston, and he apparently 

 only utilised them as in a sense forming boundaries between 

 the ; usually named colours in the spectrum. The next 

 step was taken in 18 14 by that remarkable pioneer in optical 

 practice and theory, Joseph Fraunhofer. He too was in search 

 of knowledge that would help him to improve the performance 

 of telescopes. With him it was not, as it was with Newton, 

 a question between a reflector and a single-lens object-glass. 

 For DoUond and others had shown how by utilising the 

 phenomena of different intensities and types of dispersion in 

 different kinds of glass an achromatic object-glass could be 

 made by combining properly lenses of the proper sorts of 



