Professor Curie has reported to the French Academy of Science that half a pound of radium salts will in one hour produce a heat equal to the burning of one-third of a foot of hydrogen gas. This takes place, it must be remembered, without any perceptible diminution in the radium. It emits heat maintaining a temperature of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above its surroundings. It evolves sufficient heat to melt more than its own weight of ice every hour. Radium projects its rays through solid substances without any perceptible hindrance and burns blisters through a steel case. The light is pale blue. Down in the deepest pitchblende mines, where particles of radium have been hidden away since the creation of the world, they are still found shining with their strange blue light. The radium electrons pass through the space which separates every molecule in a solid body from another. The scientific theory is that no two molecules in any body, however dense, actually touch. The relative power of radium to the X-ray is as six to one. The rays of radium have one hundred thousand times the energy of those of uranium and over one hundred times the energy of barium radiation. The scarcity of the metal will be understood when it is stated that there is far less radium in pitchblende than gold in ordinary sea water. Radium colors glass violet; transforms oxygen into ozone, white phosphorus to red; electrifies various gases and liquids, including petroleum and liquid air. Professor Sir William Crookes, the world's greatest living physicist and experimental scientist, said of radium in the June of this 1903:-- "In total darkness I laid a piece of pitchblende--the ore from which radium is extracted--face down upon a sensitized plate, and let it act with its own light for twenty-four hours. The result was a photograph, where the black pitchblende appeared light owing to the emanations from the radium contained in it. The photograph also shows these going off into space from the sides of the specimen. "Radium is dangerous to handle. Once I carried a tiny piece of radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soiree at the Royal Society, and on reaching home found a blister in my side. The blisters from radium may take months to get well, as the injurious effect goes so deep. Now I carry a thick lead box just large enough to hold the little brass case in which I keep the radium itself. There it lies--a little, tawny, crystalline patch. There would hardly be a larger quantity together in one box anywhere in England.