Handbuch der Spectroscopie

Abstract

THERE are comparatively few men of science who can accurately handle a spectroscope and interpret its indications with assurance. The number of chemists, for instance, who could look at the spectrum of a Geissler tube, and pick out at once the lines of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen or carbon, is probably very small. No one denies the importance of the spectroscopic method, but its practice requires so long an apprenticeship and so severe a training, while the experimental facts are so numerous and the pit-falls so plentiful, that the physicists and chemists are inclined to shirk the whole subject and to leave it to the few who happen to have been brought up in a spectroscopic atmosphere.

Handbuch der Spectroscopie.

By H. Kayser. Professor of Physics at the University of Bonn. Vol. i. Pp. xxiv + 782. 251 figures. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1900.)