Then comes a third class, such as is shown in the spectrum of the
brightest star in Orion, looking still a little like that of our sun;
but yet more distinctively in that of the brightest star in Hercules,
looking like a columnar or fluted structure, and concerning which the
observations of Lockyer and others create the strong presumption, not
to say certainty, that we have here a lower temperature still. Antares
and other reddish stars belong to this division, which in the very
red stars passes into the fourth type, and there are more classes and
subclasses without end; but we invite here attention particularly to
the first three, much as we might present a child, an adult, and an
old man, as types of the stages of human existence, without meaning to
deny that there are any number of ages between. We can even say that
this may be something more than a mere figure of speech, and that a
succession in age is not improbably pointed at in these types.
[Illustration: FIG. 91.--GREAT NEBULA IN ORION. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
A. A. COMMON, F. R. S.)]
We may have considered--perhaps not without a sort of awe at the
vastness of the retrospect--the past life of the worlds of our own
system, from our own globe of fluid fire as we see it by analogy in
the past, through the stages of planetary life to the actual condition
of our present green earth, and on to the stillness of the moon. Yet
the life history of our sun, we can hardly but admit, is indefinitely
longer than this. We feel, rather than comprehend, the vastness of
the period that separates our civilization from the early life of the
world; but what is this to the age of the sun, which has looked on and
seen its planetary children grow? Yet if we admit this temperature
classification of the stars, we are not far from admitting that the
spectroscope is now pointing out the stages in the life of suns
themselves; suns just beginning their life of almost infinite years;
suns in the middle of their course; suns which are growing old and
casting feebler beams,--all these and many more it brings before us.
Another division of our subject would, with more space, include a
fuller account of that strange and most interesting development of
photography which is going on even while we write; and this is so new
and so important, that we must try to give some hint of it even in
this brief summary, for even since the first numbers of this series
were written, great advances have taken place in its application to
celestial objects.
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