One reason why the extent of this great region has been so singularly underestimated, is the deceptively small space into which it appears to be compressed by the distortion of the prism. To discriminate between these crowded rays, I have been driven to the invention of a special instrument. The bolometer, which I have here, is an instrument depending upon principles which I need not explain at length, since all present may be presumed to be familiar with the success which has before attended their application in another field in the hands of the President of this Association. I may remark, however, that this special construction has involved very considerable difficulties and long labor. For the instrument here shown, platinum has been rolled by Messrs. Tiffany, of New York, into sheets, which, as determined by the kindness of Professor Rood, reach the surprising tenuity of less than one twenty-five-thousandth of an English inch (I have also iron rolled to one fifteen-thousandth inch), and from this platinum a strip is cut one one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth of an inch wide. This minute strip, forming one arm of a Wheatstone's bridge, and thus perfectly shielded from air currents, is accurately centered by means of a compound microscope in this truly turned cylinder, and the cylinder itself is exactly directed by the arms of this Y. The attached galvanometer responds readily to changes of temperature, of much less than one-ten-thousandth degree F. Since it is one and the same solar energy whose manifestations we call "light" or "heat," according to the medium which interprets them, what is "light" to the eye is "heat" to the bolometer, and what is seen as a dark line by the eye is felt as a cold line by the sentient instrument. Accordingly, if lines analogous to the dark "Fraunhofer lines" exist in this invisible region, they will appear (if I may so speak) to the bolometer as cold bands, and this hair-like strip of platina is moved along in the invisible part of the spectrum till the galvanometer indicates the all but infinitesimal change of temperature caused by its contact with such a "cold band." The whole work, it will be seen, is necessarily very slow; it is in fact a long groping in the dark, and it demands extreme patience. A portion of its results are now before you. The most tedious part of the whole process has been the determination of the wave-lengths. It will be remembered that we have (except through the work of Capt. Abney already cited, and perhaps of M. Mouton) no direct knowledge of the wave-lengths in the infra-red prismatic spectrum, but have hitherto inferred them from formulas like the well-known one of Cauchy's, all which known to me appear to be here found erroneous by the test of direct experiment, at least in the case of the prism actually employed.