m radiation. The scarcity
of the metal will be understood when it is stated that there is far less
radium in pitchblende than gold in ordinary sea water. Radium colors
glass violet; transforms oxygen into ozone, white phosphorus to red;
electrifies various gases and liquids, including petroleum and liquid
air.

Professor Sir William Crookes, the world's greatest living physicist and
experimental scientist, said of radium in the June of this 1903:--

"In total darkness I laid a piece of pitchblende--the ore from
which radium is extracted--face down upon a sensitized plate, and
let it act with its own light for twenty-four hours. The result was
a photograph, where the black pitchblende appeared light owing to
the emanations from the radium contained in it. The photograph also
shows these going off into space from the sides of the specimen.

"Radium is dangerous to handle. Once I carried a tiny piece of
radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soiree at the Royal Society, and
on reaching home found a blister in my side. The blisters from
radium may take months to get well, as the injurious effect goes so
deep. Now I carry a thick lead box just large enough to hold the
little brass case in which I keep the radium itself. There it
lies--a little, tawny, crystalline patch. There would hardly be a
larger quantity together in one box anywhere in England.

"There are several kinds of emanations from radium. Photographs
similar to those produced by the Roentgen ray tube and induction
coil can be got by means of the emanations from a small quantity of
radium. I took a screen made of zincblende, which will phosphoresce
when the emanations of radium fall upon it. I then painted upon it,
in a solution of radium, the word 'Radium.' In the dark this screen
(about three inches by four inches) gives off sufficient light to
read by. But the most striking way of showing the emanations is by
the little contrivance I call a Spinthariscope. In this a zinc
sulphide screen is fitted at the end of a short brass tube, with a
speck of radium about a millimeter away from it. Looking in the
dark through the lens at the other end one sees a regular
bombardment of the screen by the emanations. The phenomena of
radium require us to recast many of our ideas of matter,
electricity, and energy, and its discovery pro