A long series of experiments at Allegheny was completed in the summer of 1881 on the crest of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. Here, at an elevation of 14,887 feet, in the driest and purest air, perhaps, in the world, atmospheric absorptive inroads become less sensible, and the indications of the bolometer, consequently, surer and stronger. An enormous expansion was at once given to the invisible region in the solar spectrum below the red. Captain Abney had got chemical effects from undulations twelve ten-thousandths of a millimetre in length. These were the longest recognised as, or indeed believed, on theoretical grounds, to be capable of existing. Professor Langley now got heating effects from rays of above twice that wave-length, his delicate thread of platinum groping its way down nearly to thirty ten-thousandths of a millimetre, or three "microns." The known extent of the solar spectrum was thus at once more than doubled. Its visible portion covers a range of about one octave; bolometric indications already in 1884 comprised between three and four. The great importance of the newly explored region appears from the fact that three-fourths of the entire energy of sunlight reside in the infra-red, while scarcely more than one-hundredth part of that amount is found in the better known ultra-violet space.[736] These curious facts were reinforced, in 1886,[737] by further particulars learned with the help of rock-salt lenses and prisms, glass being impervious to very slow, as to very rapid vibrations. Traces were thus detected of solar heat distributed into bands of transmission alternating with bands of atmospheric absorption, far beyond the measurable limit of 5·3 microns. In 1894, Langley described at the Oxford Meeting of the British Association[738] his new "bolographic" researches, in which the sensitive plate was substituted for the eye in recording deflections of the galvanometer responding to variations of invisible heat. Finally, in 1901,[739] he embodied in a splendid map of the infra-red spectrum 740 absorption-lines of determinate wave-lengths, ranging from 0·76 to 5·3 microns. Their chemical origin, indeed, remains almost entirely unknown, no extensive investigations having yet been undertaken of the slower vibrations distinctive of particular substances; but there is evidence that seven of the nine great bands crossing the "new spectrum" (as Langley calls it)[740] are telluric, and subject to seasonal change. Here, then, he thought, might eventually be found a sure standing-ground for vitally important previsions of famines, droughts, and bonanza-crops.