XIV.—Note on Sir David Brewster's Line Y, in the infra-Red of the Solar Spectrum

Extract

Of all known examples in physical science, of simplifying, and at the same time “precisionising” some of its fundamental data, which might otherwise fall to be entangled in high numbers, none has been happier than Fraunhofer's application of the letters of the alphabet to certain chief lines in the solar spectrum. Happy both in its conception by the inventor, and its universal acceptance since then by the world. Whence it comes to pass now, that in every country, whoever observes the solar spectrum at all, with whatever instrument, large or small, diffracting or refracting, and whether he holds to the undulatory, or any other theory of light, and catalogues spectral lines either in Wave-lengths or Wave-numbers, or merely in terms of the brass scale screwed to his instrument by a maker,—yet whenever he speaks of the line A, or B, or C, or any other so named by Fraunhofer, he singles out thereby from among thousands, exactly the same identical line which any and every other spectroscopist alludes to under the same simple letter.