Who would ever have thought a pretty plaything like this could have told us what we so much wanted to know--namely, what the sun and the stars are made of? It seems too marvellous to be true, yet true it is that for ages and ages light has been carrying its silent messages to our eyes, and only recently men have learnt to interpret them. It is as if some telegraph operator had been going steadily on, click, click, click, for years and years, and no one had noticed him until someone learnt the code of dot and dash in which he worked, and then all at once what he was saying became clear. The chief instrument in translating the message that the light brings is simply a prism, a three-cornered wedge of glass, just the same as those hanging lustres belonging to the chandeliers. When a piece of glass like this is fixed in a telescope in such a way that the sun's rays fall on it, then there is thrown on to a piece of paper or any other suitable background a broad coloured band of lovely light like a little rainbow, and this is called the sun's spectrum, and the instrument by which it is seen is called a spectroscope. But this in itself could tell us little; the message it brings lies in the fact that when it has passed through the telescope, so that it is magnified, it is crossed by hundreds of minute black lines, not placed evenly at all, but scattered up and down. There may be two so close together that they look like one, and then three far apart, and then some more at different distances. When this remarkable appearance was examined carefully it was found that in sunlight the lines that appeared were always exactly the same, in the same places, and this seemed so curious that men began to seek for an explanation.