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.
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