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 fantasticexception, 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 availablereservoir 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
sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an

entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very
existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,

is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.
We cannot pick that lock at present, but----'

He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to
hear him.

'----we will.'
He put up that lean finger again, his solitarygesture.

'And then,' he said. . . .
'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual

struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will
cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of

this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no
eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's

material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert
continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,

the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out
among the stars....'

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an
actor or orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for

dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass
of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the

people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the
platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of

his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair
wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had

inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way
out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and bony as a