Excerpt from Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1896, Vol. 10 The announcement made by Professor Ramsay that a gas from the mineral Cleveite showed the yellow spectral line of solar helium A 5876, and was therefore identical with that hypothetical elementfi'6 was received by physicists with some amount of incredulity, as it was illogical to predicate the identity of any element from the near coincidence of a single line among the numerous lines which belong to other elementary substances in the gaseous condition. Nevertheless, the conspicuous bright ness and comparative isolation of the chromospheric line D3, together with the statement by Crookes, that the yellow line of the cleveite gas was singlenl in agreement with the reputed singleness of D3, gave some force to the idea that the solar and terrestrial gases were identical. Lockyeri'r and Runge, however, subsequently discovered that the yellow line of the new gas was double, and the latter observer j ustly remarked that the unknown element helium, causing the line D3 to appear in the solar spectrum, is not identical with the gas in cleveite unless D3 is also shown to be double. Runge further observed that the less refrangible of the two lines was much weaker than the other, and he found the difference in the wave-lengths of the lines to be 3 tenth metres. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.