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CHEMISTKY. 



tionary Claims and Mines and Mining. He was 

 also a member of the National Committee which 

 accompanied the remains of President Lincoln 

 to Illinois, and was a delegate to the Philadel- 

 phia Convention of 1866. In 1869 he was again 

 elected. Daring the important period of his 

 first term in the United States Senate Mr. 

 Chandler was identified with all the leading 

 measures of Congress. During the term that 

 expired in 1875 he continued chairman of the 

 Committee on Commerce. In October, 1875, 

 President Grant tendered him the post of 

 Secretary of the Interior, to fill the place made 

 vacant by the resignation of Columbus Delano. 

 He served in this position until President 

 Grant's retirement. When Senator I. P. Chris- 

 tiancy resigned his place in the Senate, early 

 in 1879, to accept the post of Minister to Peru, 

 Mr. Chandler was elected by the Legislature 

 of Michigan to fill the unexpired term of the 

 man who had succeeded him in f the Senate 

 four years before. His term of service would 

 have expired in 1881. Mr. Chandler took an 

 active part in the exciting Presidential cam- 

 paign of 1876, being the hard-working presi- 

 dent of the Republican National Executive 

 Committee. He was, during the greater por- 

 tion of his life, engaged in large business enter- 

 prises, from which he had realized a handsome 

 fortune. He was a man of commanding ap- 

 pearance, and possessed an excellent practical 

 judgment, great energy, and perseverance. 



CHEMISTRY. Oxygen in the Sun. On 

 the 13th of June last Professor Henry Draper 

 laid before the Royal Astronomical Society of 

 London the evidence by which he claims to 

 have demonstrated the existence of oxygen in 

 the sun. From a summary of his paper pub- 

 lished in the London " Times " we take the 

 following, which gives a fair idea of the na- 

 ture of the problem, and of the results of Dr. 

 Draper's investigations. It will be remem- 

 bered that when in 1859 Kirchhoff showed 

 how the dark lines of the solar spectrum en- 

 able us to analyze the vaporous envelope of 

 the sun, the substances the presence of which 

 was recognized belonged with one exception 

 to the family of metallic elements. Iron, zinc, 

 copper, aluminum, sodium, magnesium, co- 

 balt, nickel, calcium, chromium, titanium, and 

 manganese were found to be present ; and, 

 besides these metals, hydrogen was also recog- 

 nized. The absence of all evidence respecting 

 some of the other elements might not have 

 seemed remarkable, because it could well be 

 believed that they were present in quantities 

 relatively so small that our means of analyzing 

 the sun failed to detect them. But that such 

 elements as oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, all 

 of them important constituents of our earth, 

 should be absent from the sun, or should not 

 be present in quantities large enough to make 

 their detection easy, seemed surprising. In 

 the case of the two latter elements the wonder 

 was increased by the circumstance that Hug- 

 gins recognized the presence of nitrogen in the 



gaseous nebulas, and that of carbon in certain 

 comets. But, though no spectroscopic evi- 

 dence of the presence of oxygen in any of the 

 self-luminous celestial bodies had been obtained, 

 so that the absence of any evidence of its pres- 

 ence in the sun was in one sense less remark- 

 able, it was in another sense the most remark- 

 able of all the negative results of solar spectro- 

 scopic analysis. 



Oxygen is commonly believed to form one 

 third of the mass of our earth's crust, and is 

 known to form eight ninths of the water, where 

 it is combined with hydrogen, and one fifth of 

 the air, where it is mixed with nitrogen. It can 

 not be assumed that the structure of the sun 

 is identical with that of the earth ; yet it would 

 be difficult to understand how in the great 

 central mass, in which the denser elements 

 would be the more abundant, the lightest of 

 all, hydrogen, should be present in enormous 

 quantities, while oxygen, so much denser under 

 the same conditions, should be absent, or pres- 

 ent only in such small amount as to afford no 

 evidence of its existence. The natural infer- 

 ence would be that oxygen and the other non- 

 metallic elements, though really present in the 

 sun, are situated below that visible surface 

 which is called the photosphere. That at any 

 rate they are not present above that surface 

 in any considerable quantity is clearly shown 

 by what happens during total eclipses of the 

 sun ; for whereas, at the moment when the 

 sun is just fully hidden by the moon, the me- 

 tallic elements usually recognized by the ab- 

 sorptive action of their vapors on the sun's 

 light can be recognized by their emissive action, 

 a rainbow-tinted array of bright lines suddenly 

 replacing the rainbow-tinted streak crossed by 

 a corresponding array of dark lines, the bright 

 lines of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and other 

 non-metallic elements have never been recog- 

 nized, even under these favorable conditions. 

 But if oxygen existed in enormous quantities 

 within the visible globe of the sun, its presence 

 might be recognized in another way. Besides 

 the dark lines in the solar spectrum, there are 

 bright lines certainly at times, and probably 

 always. Some, indeed, have said that as the 

 glowing vapors which produce the rainbow- 

 tinted array of lines just mentioned are at 

 all times present over the sun's surface, there 

 are always bright lines ; but as the question is 

 one of relative brightness, and as these par- 

 ticular tints are fainter corresponding, in fact, 

 to the dark lines this mode of speaking seems 

 as incorrect as it would be to describe the dull 

 disk of a small red-hot globe, seen projected 

 on a bright background at a white heat, as 

 forming a bright instead of a dark spot on that 

 bright white background. When, however, as 

 sometimes happens, the known lines of some 

 element disappear and presently reappear as 

 bright lines, we perceive that for the time 

 being the spectroscopic evidence respecting 

 that particular element is changed in character. 

 We know that that element is present in the 



