among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm

blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,

dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects

very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect

of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then

the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir

William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium

particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,

induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a

happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate

thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have

been taken by these curiosities.

Section 8

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at

Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a

course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in

Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very

considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small

lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his

course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded

right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were

standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating

did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a

chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging

his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word,

eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning.

'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which

seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all

that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of

matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does

noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are

doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single

voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in

the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying

to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less

perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium-the stuff of

this incandescent gas mantle-certainly is; actinium. I feel

that we are but beginning the list. And we know now that the

atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible

and final and-lifeless-lifeless, is really a reservoir of

immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this

work. A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought

of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as

unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are

boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This

little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to

say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth

about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the

atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we

could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a

word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here

and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if

I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it

could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no

man knows, no man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff

can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release

it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium,

the radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and

that again to what we call radium A, and so the process goes on,

giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last

stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.

But we cannot hasten it.'

'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red

hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go

on! Oh, go on!'

The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change

gradual?' he asked. 'Why does only a minute fraction of the

radium disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole

itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the

uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next

lowest thing at once? Why this decay by driblets; why not a decay

en masse?… Suppose presently we find it is possible to

quicken that decay?'

The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable

idea was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed

in his seat with excitement. 'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'

The professor lifted his forefinger.

'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to

do! We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium;

not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man

might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year,

fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners

across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would

enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all

the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our

finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world

would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do

you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean

for us?'

The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'

'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only

compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that

lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day towards

radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had

learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing

utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano,

a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that

we know radio-activity to-day. This-this is the dawn of a new

day in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which

had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the

savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our

ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present