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Consequently, this assembly of the tribes, which otherwise was externally modelled on that of the curies, was in reality an assembly of the independent middle class, from which, on the one hand, the great majority of freedmen and clients were excluded as not being freeholders, and in which, on the other hand, the larger landholders had no such preponderance as in the centuries.

Experiments of Becquerel Work of the Curies Discovery of Radium Enormous Energy Various Uses.

That the curies had their lands as well as the tribes, admits of the less doubt, since among the few names of the Roman curies that have been handed down to us we find along with some apparently derived from -gentes-, e. g. -Faucia-, others certainly of local origin, e. g. -Veliensis-; each one of them embraced, in this primitive period of joint possession of land, a number of clan-lands, of which we have already spoken.

In the acclamation of the Hellenic and in the shield-striking of the Germanic assemblies there was involved an expression of the sovereign power of the community; but a wide interval separated forms such as these from the organized jurisdiction and the regulated declaration of opinion of the Latin assembly of curies.

In the ordinary course of law any one might without restriction give away his property to whom he would, but only upon condition of its immediate transfer: that the property should continue for the time being with the owner, and at his death pass over to another, was a legal impossibility unless the community should allow it; a permission which in this case the burgesses could grant not only when assembled in their curies, but also when drawn up for battle.

It is a feature significant of the new city now united in a way very different from the settlement of the "seven mounts," that, over and above the hearths of the thirty curies which the Palatine Rome had been content with associating in one building, the Servian Rome presented this general and single hearth for the city at large.

In the case of Italy the decimal system pervaded all the earliest arrangements: it may be sufficient to recall the number ten so usual in the case of witnesses, securities, envoys, and magistrates, the legal equivalence of one ox and ten sheep, the partition of the canton into ten curies and the pervading application generally of the decurial system, the -limitatio-, the tenth in offerings and in agriculture, decimation, and the praenomen -Decimus-. Among the applications of this most ancient decimal system in the sphere of measuring and of writing, the remarkable Italian ciphers claim a primary place.

Afterward they discovered the footsteps of a messenger who had been sent from Veii, in order that the State might be taken care of in due form; for the Romans in the Capitol were patricians, and represented the curies and the Government, whereas those assembled at Veii represented the tribes, but had no leaders. The latter had resolved to recall Camillus, and raise him to the dictatorship.

This proved to be another of the radio-active substances, differing from any other yet discovered, but still not the sought-for element. In a short time, however, the two Curies made the great discovery of the element radium a substance which, according to their estimate, is some one million eight hundred thousand times more radioactive than uranium.

The radio-active bodies, however, are the only ones that have afforded an opportunity for studying this transformation. In these the rapidity of the change would be directly proportionate to their radioactivity. Radium, according to the recent estimate of the Curies, would be disintegrating over a million times more rapidly than uranium.