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Germany had sent Gasgabelaus, Leybach, and Wilhelm Lamszus; France Sortell, Amand, and Buona Varilla; Great Britain Sir William Crookes, Sir Francis Soddy, and Mr. H. G. Wells, celebrated for his "The War of the Worlds" and The "World Set Free," and hence supposedly just the man to unravel a scientific mystery such as that which confronted this galaxy of immortals.

To ask which is first is to call up the old puzzle, Which is first, the egg, or the hen that laid it? According to Professor Soddy, the engineer's unit of power, that of the British cart-horse, has to be multiplied many times in a machine before it can do the work of a horse. He says that a car which two horses used to pull, it now takes twelve or fifteen engine-horse to pull.

By studying the spectrum of the gas disengaged by a solution of salt of radium, Sir William Ramsay and Professor Soddy remarked that when the gas is radioactive there are first obtained rays of gases belonging to the argon family, then by degrees, as the activity disappears, the spectrum slowly changes, and finally presents the characteristic aspect of helium.

Down from the Sierras, for the east ranges have almost no rain, pour glancing white floods toward the lowest land, and all beside them lie the campoodies, brown wattled brush heaps, looking east. In the river are mussels, and reeds that have edible white roots, and in the soddy meadows tubers of joint grass; all these at their best in the spring.

A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life, that something which clothes itself in each infinitely varied and beautiful as well as unbeautiful form of matter. We can evoke electricity at will from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life; the biogenetic law is inviolable. Professor Soddy says, "Natural philosophy may explain a rainbow but not a rabbit."

In the case of compounds of thorium Professor Rutherford discovered a similar phenomenon; since then, various physicists, Professor Soddy, Miss Brooks, Miss Gates, M. Danne, and others, have studied the properties of these emanations.

Olaf, of unhappy memory, just lifting above the water. He had emerged from the retirement of his stateroom only on being asked by the steward for his ticket and learning that the Druro was nearing the end of her journey. For nearly two days he had been submerged in Soddy on The Interpretation of Radium. The Druro was running along a sandy, low-lying beach about half a mile offshore.

This is the electro-magnetic world which underlies the material world and which, as Professor Soddy says, probably completely embraces it, and has no mechanical analogy. To those accustomed only to the grosser ideas of matter and its motions, says the British scientist, this electro-magnetic world is as difficult to conceive of as it would be for us to walk upon air.

"With many of the feelings of an air-man," says Soddy, "who has left behind for the first time the solid ground beneath him," we make this plunge into the demonstrable verities of the newest physics; matter in the old sense gross matter fades away.

Here the stream ran once in a maze of soddy banks and watered all the ground, and afterward ran out at the canyon's mouth across the mesa in a wash of bone-white boulders as far as it could. That was not very far, for it was a slender stream. It had its source on the high crests and hollows of the near-by mountain, in the snow banks that melted and seeped downward through the rocks.