The book of solar chemistry must be read in characters exclusively of absorption. Nevertheless, the whole truth is unlikely to be written there. That a substance displays none of its distinctive beams in the spectrum of the sun or of a star, affords scarcely a presumption against its presence. For it may be situated below the level where absorption occurs, or under a pressure such as to efface lines by widening and weakening them; it may be at a temperature so high that it gives out more light than it takes up, and yet its incandescence may be masked by the absorption of other bodies; finally, it may just balance absorption by emission, with the result of complete spectral neutrality. An instructive example is that of the chromospheric element helium. Father Secchi remarked in 1868[686] that there is no dark line in the solar spectrum matching its light; and his observation has been fully confirmed.[687] Helium-absorption is, however, occasionally noticed in the penumbræ of spots.[688] Our terrestrial vital element might then easily subsist unrecognisably in the sun. The inner organisation of the oxygen molecule is a considerably _plastic_ one. It is readily modified by heat, and these modifications are reflected in its varying modes of radiating light. Dr. Schuster enumerated in 1879[689] four distinct oxygen spectra, corresponding to various stages of temperature, or phases of electrical excitement; and a fifth has been added by M. Egoroff's discovery in 1883[690] that certain well-known groups of dark lines in the red end of the solar spectrum (Fraunhofer's A and B) are due to absorption by the cool oxygen of our air. These persist down to the lowest temperatures, and even survive a change of state. They are produced essentially the same by liquid, as by aërial oxygen.[691]