Who, for instance, will find a use for gallium, the metal of France? It was described in 1869 by Mendeleef in advance of its advent and has been known in person since 1875, but has not yet been set to work. It is such a remarkable metal that it must be good for something. If you saw it in a museum case on a cold day you might take it to be a piece of aluminum, but if the curator let you hold it in your hand--which he won't--it would melt and run over the floor like mercury. The melting point is 87 deg. Fahr. It might be used in thermometers for measuring temperatures above the boiling point of mercury were it not for the peculiar fact that gallium wets glass so it sticks to the side of the tube instead of forming a clear convex curve on top like mercury. Then there is columbium, the American metal. It is strange that an element named after Columbia should prove so impractical. Columbium is a metal closely resembling tantalum and tantalum found a use as electric light filaments. A columbium lamp should appeal to our patriotism. The so-called "rare elements" are really abundant enough considering the earth's crust as a whole, though they are so thinly scattered that they are usually overlooked and hard to extract. But whenever one of them is found valuable it is soon found available. A systematic search generally reveals it somewhere in sufficient quantity to be worked. Who, then, will be the first to discover a use for indium, germanium, terbium, thulium, lanthanum, neodymium, scandium, samarium and others as unknown to us as tungsten was to our fathers?