There are, in nature, a number of simple bodies called elements.  Every one of these, when ignited under suitable conditions, emits a light which belongs to it alone, and by which it can be distinguished from every other substance.  I do not say that we can try the experiments in the simple way I have here indicated.  Many of the materials will yield light which will require to be studied by much more elaborate artifices than those which have sufficed for us.  But you will see that the method affords a means of finding out the actual substances present in the sun or in the stars.  There is a practical difficulty in the fact that each of the heavenly bodies contains a number of different elements; so that in the light it sends us the hues arising from distinct substances are blended into one beam.  The first thing to be done is to get some way of splitting up a beam of light, so as to discover the components of which it is made.  You might have a skein of silks of different hues tangled together, and this would be like the sunbeam as we receive it in its unsorted condition.  How shall we untangle the light from the sun or a star?  I will show you by a simple experiment.  Here is a beam from the electric light; beautifully white and bright, is it not?  It looks so pure and simple, but yet that beam is composed of all sorts of colors mingled together, in such proportions as to form white light.  I take a wedge-shaped piece of glass called a prism, and when I introduce it into the course of the beam, you see the transformation that has taken place (Fig. 4).  Instead of the white light you have now all the colors of the rainbow—­red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, marked by their initial letters in the figure.  These colors are very beautiful, but they are transient, for the moment we take away the prism they all unite again to form white light.  You see what the prism has done; it has bent all the light in passing through it; but it is more effective in bending the blue than the red, and consequently the blue is carried away much further than the red.  Such is the way in which we study the composition of a heavenly body.  We take a beam of its light, we pass it through a prism, and immediately it is separated into its components; then we compare what we find with the lights given by the different elements, and thus we are enabled to discover the substances which exist in the distant object whose light we have examined.  I do not mean to say that the method is a simple one; all I am endeavoring to show is a general outline of the way in which we have discovered the materials present in the stars.  The instrument that is employed for this purpose is called the spectroscope.  And perhaps you may remember that name by these lines, which I have heard from an astronomical friend:—­

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
  Now we find out what you are,
  When unto the midnight sky,
  We the spectroscope apply.”

[Illustration:  FIG. 4.  HOW A RAY OF LIGHT IS SPLIT UP.]