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Updated: June 14, 2025
They talk the argot of evolution, while they no more understand the essence and the import of evolution than does a South Sea Islander or Sir Oliver Lodge understand the noumena of radio-activity. Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur.
Explosives are manufactured articles; explosiveness is a property of certain arrangements of certain quantities of certain elements: so far as experiments have gone, it has not been found possible to add the property of radio-activity to an inactive substance, or to remove the property of radio-activity from an active substance; the cessation of the radio-activity of an active substance is accompanied by the disappearance of the substance, and the production of inactive bodies altogether unlike the original active body.
Since the distribution of radio-active matter throughout the earth is so great, however, it is as yet impossible to determine whether this may not account for the radio-activity of all substances. As we have just seen, recent evidence seems to point to the cause of the disruption of radio-active atoms as lying in the atoms themselves.
Try and conceive how small each of these atoms must be, and then try and grasp the fact, only lately proved by the discovery of Radio-activity, that each of these atoms is a great family made up of bodies analogous to the planets of our solar system and whose rate of motion is comparable only to that of Light.
The late revelations of chemistry, Roentgen rays, x-rays, radio-activity of metals, etc., throw an interesting light upon the seemingly infinite divisibility of matter. A small particle of a given substance may for many years throw off a continuous shower of corpuscles without perceptibly diminishing its volume. For an illustration we may take the odoriferous musk.
Professor Biggleswade, who had heard vaguely of and rather looked down upon such new-fangled toys as radium and thorium and helium and argon for the latest astonishing developments in the theory of radio-activity had brought Sir Angus McCurdie his world-wide fame said somewhat ironically: "If the experiments were so important, why didn't you lock yourself up with your test tubes and electric batteries and finish them alone?"
The transformation of the radio-active elements suggestive of the transmutation of metals was perhaps the most interesting idea suggested, but the discussion ranged mainly round the effect which the discovery of radio-activity has had on physics and chemistry in its bearing on the origin of matter, on geology as bearing on the internal heat of the earth, and on medicine in its curative powers.
To attempt "to imagine a model which has in it the potentiality of explaining" radio-activity, the production of kathode rays, and the other chemical and physical properties of elements and compounds, might indeed seem to be a hopeless undertaking. A beginning has been made in the mental construction of such a model by Professor Sir J.J. Thomson.
Evidently, the simplest way for a chemist to think about radio-activity was to think of it as an atomic property; hence, as atomic properties had always been regarded, in the last analysis, as properties of elements, it was natural to place the radio-active substances in the class elements, provided that one forgot for the time that these substances have not the class-mark have-not-been-decomposed.
Here we are, flying at top speed in perfect ease and safety with no engine nothing to catch fire nothing to break or bust and the whole mechanism mysteriously makes its own motive power as it goes. Radio-activity it may be but its condensation and use for such a purpose is the secret invention of a woman and surely we must admit her genius!
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