"O Rataplan! It is a merry note, And mother, I'm for 'listing in the morn:"

"And would ye, son, to wear a scarlet coat,

Go leave your mother's latter age forlorn?"

"O mother, I am sick of sheep and goat, Fat cattle, and the reaping of the corn: I long to see the British colors float:

For glory, glory, glory, was I born." She saw him march. It was a gallant sight.

She blest herself, and praised him for a

man.

And straight he hurried to the bitter fight,

And found a bullet in the drear Soudan. They dug a shallow grave-'twas all they might:

And that's the end of glory. Rataplan!

April, 1891. EDWARD CRA CROFT LEFROY.

THE NEW

From The Nineteenth Century. ASTRONOMY: A PERSONAL RETROSPECT.

While progress in all branches of knowledge has been rapid beyond precedent during the past sixty years, in at least two directions this knowledge has been so unexpected and novel in character that two new sciences may be said to have arisen: the new medicine, with which the names of Lister and of Pasteur will remain associated; and the new astronomy, of the birth and early growth of which I have now to speak.

The new astronomy, unlike the old astronomy to which we are indebted for skill in the navigation of the seas, the calculation of the tides, and the daily regulation of time, can lay no claim to afford us material help in the routine of daily life. Her sphere lies outside the earth. Is she less fair? Shall we pay her less court because it is to mental culture in its highest form, to our purely intellectual joys that she contributes? For surely in no part of nature are the noblest and most profound conceptions of the human spirit more directly called forth than in the study of the heavens and the host thereof.

That with the glorie of so goodly sight The hearts of men

may lift themselves up hyer. May we not rather greet her in the words of Horace: "O matre pulchra filia pulchrior"?

As it fell to my lot to have some part in the early development of this new science, it has been suggested to me that the present Jubilee year of retrospect would be a suitable occasion to give some account of its history from the standpoint of my own work.

Before I begin the narrative of my personal observations, it is desirable that I should give a short statement of the circumstances which led up to the birth of the new science in 1859, and also say a few words of the state of scientific opinion about the matters of which it treats, just before that time.

It is not easy for men of the present generation, familiar with the knowl

edge which the new methods of research of which I am about to speak have revealed to us, to put themselves. back a generation, into the position of the scientific thought which existed on these subjects in the early years of the queen's reign. At that time any knowledge of the chemical nature and of the physics of the heavenly bodies was regarded as not only impossible of attainment by any methods of direct observation, but as, indeed, lying altogether outside the limitations imposed upon man by his senses, and by the fixity of his position upon the earth.

It could never be, it was confidently thought, more than a matter of presumption, whether even the matter of the sun, and much less that of the stars, were of the same nature as that of the earth, and the unceasing energy radiated from it due to such matter at a high temperature. The nebular hypothesis of Laplace at the end of the last century required, indeed, that matter similar to that of the earth should exist throughout the solar system; but then this hypothesis itself needed for its full confirmation the independent and direct observation that the solar matter was terrestrial in its nature. This theoretical probability in the case of the sun vanished almost into thin air when the attempt was made to extend it to the stellar hosts; for it might well be urged that in those immensely distant regions an original difference of the primordial stuff as well as other conditions of condensation were present, giving rise to groups of substances which have but little analogy with those of our earthly chemistry.

About the time of the queen's accession to the throne the French philosopher Comte put very clearly in his "Cours de Philosophie Positive" the views then held, of the impossibility of direct observations of the chemical nature of the heavenly bodies. He says:

On conçoit en effet, que nous puissions conjecturer, avec quelque espoir de succès, sur la formation du système solaire dont nous faisons partie, car il nous présente de nombreux phénomènes parfaitement connus, susceptibles peut-être de

porter un témoignage décisif de sa véritable origine immédiate. Mais quelle pourrait être, au contraire, la base rationnelle de nos conjectures sur la formation des soleils eux-mêmes? Comment confirmer ou infirmer à ce sujet, d'apres les phénomènes, aucune hypothèse cosmogonique, lorsqu'il n'existe vraiment en ce genre aucum phénomène exploré, ni même, sans doute, EXPLORABLE? [The capitals are mine.]

We could never know for certain, it seemed, whether the matter and the forces with which we are familiar are peculiar to the earth, or are common with it to the midnight sky,

rays may be blotted out, others may be enhanced in brilliancy. These differences, countless in variety, form a code of signals, in which is conveyed to us, when once we have made out the cipher in which it is written, information of the chemical nature of the celestial gases by which the different light rays have been blotted out, or by which they have been enhanced. In the hands of

the astronomer a prism has now become more potent in revealing the unknown than even was said to be "Agrippa's magic glass."

It was the discovery of this code of signals, and of its interpretation, which

For how could we extend the methods of the laboratory to bodies at distances so great that even the imagination fails to realize them?

The only communication from them which reaches us across the gulf of space is the light which tells us of their -existence. Fortunately this light is not so simple in its nature as it seems to be to the unaided eye. In reality it is very complex; like a cable of many strands, it is made up of light rays of many kinds. Let this light-cable pass from air obliquely through a piece of glass, and its separate strand-rays all go astray, each turning its own way, and then go on apart. Make the glass into the shape of a wedge or prism, and the rays are twice widely scattered.

astronomy. We must glance, but very briefly, at some of the chief steps in the progress of events which slowly led up to this discovery.

Newton, in his classical work upon the solar spectrum, failed, through some strange fatality, to discover the narrow gaps wanting in light, which, as dark lines, cross the colors of the spectrum and constitute the code of symbols. His failure is often put down to his using a round hole in place of a narrow slit, through the overlapping of the images of which the dark lines failed to show themselves. Though Newton did use a round hole, he states distinctly in his "Optics" that later he adopted a narrow opening in the form of a long parallelogram—that is, a true slit-at first one-tenth of an inch in

width, then only one-twentieth of an inch, and at last still narrower. These conditions under which Newton worked were such as should have shown him the dark lines upon his screen. Professor Johnson has recently repeated Newton's experiments under strictly similar conditions, with the result that the chief dark lines were well seen. For some reason Newton failed to discover them. A possible cause may have been the bad annealing of his prism, though he says that it was made of good glass and free from bubbles.

The dark lines were described first by Wollaston in 1792, who strangely assoclated them with the boundaries of the spectral colors, and so turned contem