We have now some difficult work before us. Hitherto we have been delighted by objects which addressed themselves as much to our aesthetic taste as to our scientific faculty; we have ridden pleasantly to the base of the final cone of Etna, and must now dismount and march through ashes and lava, if we would enjoy the prospect from the summit. Our problem is to connect the dark lines of Fraunhofer with the bright ones of the metals. The white beam of the lamp is refracted in passing through our two prisms, but its different components are refracted in different degrees, and thus its colours are drawn apart. Now the colour depends solely upon the rate of oscillation of the atoms of the luminous body; red light being produced by one rate, blue light by a much quicker rate, and the colours between red and blue by the intermediate rates. The solid incandescent coal-points give us a continuous spectrum; or in other words they emit rays of all possible periods between the two extremes of the spectrum. Colour, as many of you know, is to light what _pitch_ is to sound. When a violin-player presses his finger on a string he makes it shorter and tighter, and thus, causing it to vibrate more speedily, heightens the pitch. Imagine such a player to move his fingers slowly along the string, shortening it gradually as he draws his bow, the note would rise in pitch by a regular gradation; there would be no gap intervening between note and note. Here we have the analogue to the continuous spectrum, whose colours insensibly blend together without gap or interruption, from the red of the lowest pitch to the violet of the highest. But suppose the player, instead of gradually shortening his string, to press his finger on a certain point, and to sound the corresponding note; then to pass on to another point more or less distant, and sound its note; then to another, and so on, thus sounding particular notes separated from each other by gaps which correspond to the intervals of the string passed over; we should then have the exact analogue of a spectrum composed of separate bright bands with intervals of darkness between them. But this, though a perfectly true and intelligible analogy, is not sufficient for our purpose; we must look with the mind's eye at the oscillating atoms of the volatilised metal.