of the scientific method known as spectrolysis.  The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant.  Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world became aware of a discovery of vast moment.  The light of the sun, and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be analysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant spaces.  We can know what constitutes a star as unerringly as we know the constituents of the earth.  Still more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division.  In fact here was a method of chemical and physical analysis, much more powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe deepened and widened wondrously.  I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff’s lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot.  Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe.  Once, as I stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances.  In the depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye.  But it is interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so potent a Prospero.

In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of an associate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-analysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff.  In frame Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons, and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal schlafrock or working dress of ample dimensions, with his large head crowned by a peculiar cap.  On the tables within the spaces flickered numerously the “Bunsen burners,” his invention, and it was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many lambent flames.  I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly.  In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but still a man to arouse deep interest.  He was in the front rank of the chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.