176 THE SUN ITS CHEMICAL ANALYSIS. 



regarded as the centre of the cosmos the little eccentric ball which 

 carries him; he thought that between himself and mineral or organic 

 nature there was no bond or relationship. We know now that ma- 

 terially we differ in nothing from all that surrounds us; we are living 

 laboratories tlirough which circulate all terrestrial substances. At 

 this moment it is demonstrated that these terrestrial substances oc- 

 cupy our whole planetary system. "We were already united with the 

 animal, the plant, the water, the dust, with the infinitely little; we 

 are now united with the sun, with the infinitely great. 



The alchemists had instinctively suspected the unity of chemical 

 composition of the planetary system; ^t least, they had established, 

 in virtue of certain mystic ideas, relations between the diflerent 

 metals and the bodies which revolve around the sun; they never for- 

 got the stars in studying the great problem of the transmutation of 

 metals. We must needs be indulgent towards these aberrations of 

 the human intellect, for truth itself has at times such an aspect of 

 strangeness and magic as to affect the mind with doubt and bewilder- 

 ment. The imagination must be poor, indeed, to look with indiffer- 

 ence on the experiments of M.M. Kirchoff and Bunsen. The ma- 

 terial of the sun analyzed in the light which it transmits to us ! Tlie 

 most subtle and most inaccessible of things subjected to the most 

 precise appreciation ! Is there not here something to call forth as- 

 tonishment and admiration ? Into his darkened chamber the physicist 

 admits a solar ray; there, tranquilly and at his ease, he compares his 

 artificial lights with that light which inundates the universe, which 

 pours hfe and heat to distances which thought cannot measure, and 

 from this comparison he succeeds in deducing a complete theory of 

 the physical and chemical constitution of the sun, of the grand 

 phenomena of which that star is the theatre, of the spots which 

 astronomers descry in it. 



The recent labors of M.M. Kirchoif and Bunsen are based on an 

 analysis of the solar light. To analyze is to decompose; but we can 

 only decompose that which is not simple. The solar light in effect is 

 not a simple light; a ray, however attenuate we suppose it, traversing 

 the eye of a needle, or some crevice incomparably more narrow, is 

 not homogeneous; it is composed of an infinity of differently colored 

 rays, which, united in a pencil, constitute what we call white light. 

 We have but to cast our eyes around to comprehend that the light of 

 the sun comprises all colors; the diversified world which surrounds us 

 is not a sketch, it is a picture. If the solar beam were simple, all 

 objects would appear to us with the simple contrasts of light and 

 shadow, as in photographs : the greatest charm of nature would be 

 destroyed. The color does not belong to the objects, for when the 

 sun has disappeared beneath the horizon all tints vanish in the same 

 darkness. 



Is there not a means of decomposing this ray of light, which we 

 just now imagined as traversing an aperture, in such a way as to 

 separate the different rays that compose it? Nothing is easier; it 

 suffices to make it traverse a prism of glass by which the different 

 rays are unequally refracted. This phenomenon of refraction, which 



