50 A CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN ASTRONOMY. 



As Miss Giberne expresses it, " Although he now 

 saw the lines he could not understand them : 

 he could not read what they said. They spoke 

 to him indeed about the Sun, but they spoke 

 to him in a foreign language, the key to which 

 he did not possess." However, he expressed the 

 belief that the pair of lines in the solar spectrum, 

 which he marked D, coincided with the pair 

 of bright lines emitted by incandescent sodium. 

 Although he doubtless suspected that the lines 

 conveyed intelligence regarding the elements in 

 the Sun, he never was able properly to decipher 

 their meaning. Had he lived, he would prob- 

 ably have made the great discovery; but these 

 investigations were cut short by his sudden 

 and untimely death on June 7, 1826. 



After the death of Fraunhofer, very little 

 was done to forward the study of spectrum 

 analysis. Investigations in this branch of 

 research were made, however, by Sir John 

 Herschel (1792-1871), William Allen Miller 

 (1817-1870), Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), and 

 others. Two famous men of science had partly 

 discovered the secret. These were Sir George 

 Stokes (1819-1903), of Cambridge, and Anders 

 John Angstrom (1812-1872) of Upsala. Of 

 Angstrom's work, published in 1853, it has 

 been said that it would " have obtained a high 



