GASEOUS SPECTRA UNDER HIGH DISPERSION. 433 



told, informally of course, where a secret meeting is concerned, — that a Royal 

 Society Fellow on the Council of the R. A. S. informed that body that my 

 chemistry was entirely wrong, and my paper was consequently rejected. 



Now Carbon has long been known to be one of the most refractory 

 substances under the Sun ; though when exposed to the most terrible 

 temperatures of Condensed Induction Electric sparks, it is forced at last, 

 in the unanimous consent of all men, into incandescent vapour, and then gives 

 out a totally different spectrum, to anything we have been describing, viz., one 

 of a few isolated lines merely, see No. 3, Part I. of my Index Map (Plate 

 LXXVII.). This therefore was termed by the London men, " Carbon spectrum 

 No. 1;" while the spectrum we have been discussing, and which may be seen 

 in the base of the weak flame of any little candle whose temperature is low 

 indeed by comparison, was, with them, Carbon spectrum No. 2, or 3, or 4 ; on 

 the then new presumption that a Chemical Element, instead of being confined 

 to one spectrum alone, may have several. 



The history of the origin, and metropolitan establishment, of this very 

 contradictory conclusion for Carbon, is, that Dr Attfield of London in 1862, 

 presented a paper to the Royal Society there, which that body accepted and 

 printed; — wherein he claimed to have seen the banded spectrum of the Blow- 

 pipe flame of Coal-gas and air in every possible compound of Carbon with either 

 H or any other gas ; whence he decided, that the spectrum must be that of 

 pure Carbon alone ; however different it might be from the English Carbon spec- 

 trum No. 1. This decision therefore having been given forth under the auspices 

 of the Royal Society, London, has remained the rule ever since in that region, 

 however violently it conflicts with the Natural Philosophy of the case, and the 

 Chemistry of Carbon in general. 



Outside the London circle some very different ideas prevailed; but were 

 ignored by the grand central authority there, until at last the progress of 

 knowledge raised an earthquake in their midst, with effects which would have 

 been far less disastrous, had the London magnates been previously only a little 

 less exclusive. For thus, with a charming naivete of confession, explains the 

 British Association's Report of 1880, — 



" On the whole it may be said that, from the publication of Attfield 's paper 

 (1862) until the year 1875, every spectroscopist, whether he was a chemist oi 

 physicist, who ' had set to work to decide the question, came to the conclusion 

 that the Candle-spectrum was a true spectrum of Carbon (i.e., of O, not CH), 

 and the question appeared to be settled." 



Now I was not original in having, on the other hand, during that interval, 

 upheld the Candle-spectrum to be one of CH, not of C ; for I had learned it 

 previously from my friend Professor Swan, who, with his paper on the subject 

 to this Society in 1856, is an older authority by many years on the Candle- 



