CELESTIAL CHEMISTRY. 



By C. F. JuRiTZ, M.A., D.Sc, F.I.C. 



(Evening Discourse delivered in the Tozini Hall, Bloemfontein^ 



on Tuesday, September 28, 1909: Illustrated by 51 



lantern slides.) 



Your Excellency, ladies and gentlemen : — 



I believe it was one of our modern astronomers who said, 

 not long" ago, that, in these days of higher education, most 

 people seem — like Bunyan's man with the muck-rake — to have 

 their eyes so fixed on the baubles of earth that they are 

 unable to see anything in the heavens. There is a vast amount 

 of truth in that remark, and so I propose this evening to take 

 you on a lofty flight amongst things celestial. 



About fifteen years ago Sir J. W. Dawson published a book 

 entitled " The meeting-place of geology and history." The 

 author there sought to connect together the geological records 

 of the remotest past, written in the rocks by the Creator's 

 finger, with the sacred and secular records of the last six 

 thousand years, enscribed in books by the hand of man : that 

 is to say, his object was to throw a bridge across time. We 

 to-night will endeavour to bridge space, and our subject finds 

 a fitting symbol in the delicate and wonderful instrument 

 whereby some of the most striking discoveries of modern 

 science have been achieved. This instrument, the spectroscope, 

 with its thi:ee tubes converging to a common centre, symbolises 

 very appropriately the meeting-point of the three sciences, 

 astronomy, chemistry, and physics. In the researches 

 performed by its aid these sciences have been so interlaced, and 

 have become so interdependent, that it is quite impossible to 

 say just where the domain of one ends, and that of another 

 begins. It is of necessity true, as a general principle, that the 

 sciences, as they are called, continually overlap each other, but 

 in present day astronomy this is the case in a most marked 

 degree, so much so that the expression astro-physical- 

 chemistry has come to denote this special branch of knowledge 

 where these three sciences meet. If therefore, I do not 

 occtipy myself exclusively with the chemical side of my subject, 

 please forgive me : to do so were an impossible task. But 

 however impracticable it may be to keep outside the borders 

 of astronomy and physics, I hope to trangress them no oftener 

 than can be helped, and only as far as necessary to make quite 

 plain to you some of the facts that have been ascertained 

 regarding the chemistry of the heavenly bodies. 



It is only of late years that chemistry has assumed the 

 important relation to astronomy that it now occupies, and to 

 illustrate the present position I can do no better than to quote 



