duty both to live and to radiate to all around him.

In these summer days of 1903, in this golden dawn of the twentieth
century, the world is echoing with wonder in the discovery of a new and
most mysterious force in nature,--radium. Science is, at this date,
powerless to analyze or explain its marvellous power. The leading
scientists of the world of learning--Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver
Lodge, and Professor Curie (who, with Mme. Curie, has the honor of being
its discoverer)--believe that in radium will be found the true solution
of the problem of matter. Radium gives off rays at the speed of one
hundred and twenty thousand miles a second, and these rays offer the
most extraordinary heat, light, and power. Yet with this immense
radiation it suffers no diminution of energy; nor can any scientist yet
discern from what source this power is fed. A grain of it will furnish
enough light to enable one to read, and, as Professor J. J. Thomson has
observed, it will suffer no diminution in a million years. It will burn
the flesh through a metal box and through clothing, but without burning
the texture of the garments. The rays given out by radium cannot be
refracted, polarized, or regularly reflected in the way of ordinary
light, although some of them can be turned aside by a magnet.

Professor Curie has reported to the French Academy of Science that half
a pound of radium salts will in one hour produce a heat equal to the
burning of one-third of a foot of hydrogen gas. This takes place, it
must be remembered, without any perceptible diminution in the radium. It
emits heat maintaining a temperature of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above its
surroundings. It evolves sufficient heat to melt more than its own
weight of ice every hour. Radium projects its rays through solid
substances without any perceptible hindrance and burns blisters through
a steel case. The light is pale blue. Down in the deepest pitchblende
mines, where particles of radium have been hidden away since the
creation of the world, they are still found shining with their strange
blue light. The radium electrons pass through the space which separates
every molecule in a solid body from another. The scientific theory is
that no two molecules in any body, however dense, actually touch. The
relative power of radium to the X-ray is as six to one. The rays of
radium have one hundred thousand times the energy of those of uranium
and over one hundred times the energy of bariu