Government have gained in strength by some eight seats: the party made no attempt at organisation throughout the colony, and its increase in numbers represents a growth of opinion favourable to restoring the freehold tenure in the Government Land Settlement system, and adverse to continued borrowing and financial extravagance. It cannot in any sense, however, be said to represent the old so-called 'Conservative party'-the opinions and traditions associated with the Hall-Whitaker-Atkinson Administrations have practically disappeared from politics. The number claimed for the Opposition is reached by including advocates of the Freehold and disciples of Henry George; champions of prohibition and defenders of the liquor interest; men with sound views on finance and theorists who believe in a State Bank and paper money. A party so heterogeneous as this can only by a violent fiction be considered a remnant of the old Conservative' party. The most vigorous opposition to Mr. Seddon will in the future come from men who are not less, but more, radical than he. Paradoxical though it sounds, it is probably no exaggeration to say that if Mr. Seddon continues in politics, his influence will be found, in the course of every few years, to be the strongest conservative force in public opinion.

One final comment is suggested by the conduct of the people at the election in spite of the keen excitement roused by the liquor question, the elections were marked throughout the colony by the utmost good order and decorum. There was a time when eggs and flour were, in New Zealand as elsewhere, no contemptible weapon of political controversy. A candidate now has nothing worse to face than good-tempered 'chaff' and 'heckling' at the hands of questioners. The new spirit of orderliness on election-day is to some extent attributable to a wise provision of the law by which all bars are closed from noon till 7 P.M. on the day of the polling; but it is mainly the result of the entry of women into politics. In the magistrates' courts of the two largest towns in New Zealand, the police presented clean charge-sheets on the day following the elections. Not a single arrest had been made for drunkenness or disorderly conduct.

Christchurch, New Zealand.

O. T. J. ALPERS.

RADIUM AND ITS POSITION IN NATURE

THE position of the new element radium in the universe is unique. At present prices its purified compounds are sold at such a figure that two tons, or sufficient to fill a cart and be drawn by a strong horse on a level road, would liquidate the English National Debt. But that two tons do not exist in the whole earth is probable from the fact that in three years of isolation and preparation M. and Madame Curie have obtained not more than an avoirdupois pound weight of its compounds. These facts, which bring into such strong relief the scarcity of the element, have to be taken along with another which at first sight appears to present no point of connection. Runge and Precht have just found that the probable atomic weight of radium is 258; in other words, that its atoms are the heaviest known, being 258 times heavier than those of hydrogen. An atomic weight has a cosmic significance; there is undoubted connection between it and the quantity of the element which exists in nature. The heavier atoms are the rarest, and radium, with the heaviest of all atoms, ought to be the rarest element in existence.

It is necessary in science, as in everyday life, to look at things in proportion, and in doing this in the case of radium it would appear to have a very insignificant place indeed in nature. By utilising price statistics we obtain some idea of this. In the following table two chemical family groups of elements are compared, and by the side of the atomic weight of each substance is placed the troy weight in ounces which is purchasable for the approximate sum of four guineas:

Gold, with an atomic weight of 197, is the rarest of the members of its family, and how rare it really is one can form some idea from the statement that all of this precious metal which has been won up to the present time by an expenditure of fabulous amounts of capital and an unexampled waste of life would probably, in the condition of

bar gold, not fill more than a couple of good-sized rooms in an ordinary house, and is an infinitesimal quantity when compared with the five thousand and odd trillions of tons of the earth's mass of other elements. Radium, at the end of its series, is rarer still.

The following appear to be the circumstances of its discovery. In 1898 it was announced in Comptes Rendus by Professor P. Curie, Madame Curie, and G. Bemont that they had found a new element in pitch-blende residues, in company with barium, and analytically behaving like it, but extremely radio-active. By fractional precipitation of the barium chloride from solution by means of alcohol, chlorides were obtained containing the new element which had 900 times the radiant activity of uranium, the principal element in the mineral pitch-blende. The amount of radium present was minute in the extreme, for it only affected the atomic weight of barium to a very small extent, although always in the same direction, that of increase as compared with inactive barium.

Radiations from this trace made a photographic negative in half a minute where uranium or thorium compounds would have taken hours, and its radiations, after passing through aluminium, rendered a film of barium platinocyanide luminous enough to make it visible in the dark without any apparent supply of energy. After some four years of labour, sufficiently pure samples of its compounds have been obtained for its atomic weight to be ascertained, with the result already mentioned. Chemists are thus enabled now to assign it a place among its fellows in the periodic classification of the elements.

When the position is clearly understood, it is at once seen that it must be an element differing from all others in its properties, and differing indeed so widely that, if judged from the standpoint of any one of them, even the laws of nature might appear at first sight to be defied. It is as far outside the ordinary system of atoms as Neptune is outside the planets of the solar system. Its place may be popularly appreciated from the following observations on the Periodic Law.

A draught-board is made up of sixty-four black and white squares. If there were only sixty-four elements, A, B, C, &c., in nature, with atomic weights graded from one to sixty-four, they would just fill all its squares. Let such a set of hypothetical elements be orderly disposed in the squares, commencing with A, atomic weight 1, at the top left-hand corner and proceeding along the top line up to eight, then coming back and filling the square under 1 with an atomic weight of 9, and so on in orderly succession; we then get, when the board is filled up, all the atomic weights of elements. A, B, C, &c., disposed in periodic fashion. In this ideal arrangement we should have eight vertical groups; all the elements on the black squares of one of them would form a natural chemical family, and

the same would be the case with all the elements on the white squares of a vertical column. The family likeness would show itself in a gradation of properties of each of the elements, some given quality gradually increasing or decreasing as the atomic weights increased. As an illustration, which has also a bearing on subsequent observations, one might take the property of transparency to X-rays. These figures require no further comment.

Such is the principle of the periodic classification known as the Periodic Law. There are many other arrangements devised of disposing the elements; the squared parallelogram is here chosen as being the simplest. It must be understood, however, that this draught-board illustration cannot cover all the facts, as the atoms of elements do not rise in unit steps and there are more than sixty-four of them, but it enables a clear idea to be conveyed to the mind when the statement is made that the elements calcium, strontium, and barium occur in the second group, and that radium, with an atomic weight of 258, occupies the lowest place in this family group, and further that its position is so low down in the vertical column that it is in the thirteenth square from the top. It stands alone; isolated. Its position confers on it properties which make it peerless among the elements, and only to be described by a succession of superlatives. These properties may be predicted with more or less success from the known properties of other members of its group. Its soluble compounds will be extremely poisonous. Their gamut of colour will be limited, being for the most part only white or yellow. They will be highly susceptible to radiant influence or to sensible heat; the anhydrous bromide, for example, will have a specific heat about one-twentieth of that of water, so that to produce a given effect much less heat or radiant energy will be required than in the case of compounds of elements with lower atomic weights in the same family group. They will absorb X-rays with great avidity, and will in all probability possess this property to a phenomenal degree. Good absorbers of radiant energy are regarded as good radiators, and radium compounds will form no exception to this rule. We may well leave prediction here and return to a consideration of ascertained fact. Radium compounds pour out torrents of obscure radiations termed Becquerel rays, rays which have been regarded as being intermediate between the X-rays of the focus tube and ordinary

light. They have the peculiar penetrative power of X-rays and will pass through aluminium. Like X-rays they blister the skin and leave it in a condition which eventually requires dressing, the sores sometimes taking weeks to heal. X-rays have a pulsating character, and it is not improbable that this is a feature of Becquerel rays. X-rays produce phosphorescence in bodies like zinc sulphide (hexagonal zinc-blende); sunlight produces the same phenomenon in calcium sulphide (Balmain's paint), and Becquerel rays give the effect notably with the zinc-blende. Air is made an electric conductor or suffers ionisation under the influence of X-rays; Becquerel rays produce the same effect. In fact, the Becquerel rays coming from radium compounds have so many characters in common with Röntgen rays that they have latterly been spoken of as X-rays. The mechanism of their origin cannot be said, as yet, to be thoroughly understood, but it is probably like the succession of events concerned in the phosphorescence of Balmain's paint after exposure to solar light. Here we have absorption of the sun's light; conversion of the ether undulations of the solar rays to the molecular vibrations of the compound, and communication of the latter motions to the ether again, with the visible effect of phosphorescence. This explanation would have done six months ago, but Sir Oliver Lodge, who has recently given us the latest ideas on electrons, will probably regard it as old-fashioned. I, however, prefer it, electrons notwithstanding, and the radiations of radium compounds may be similarly explained, with the qualification that the radiations in this case either have some quality pertaining to ether undulations, in extreme degree, or a superadded quality which makes them of a pronounced radioactive nature. What this latter is I shall presently attempt to show.

It will be of interest here, as bearing on our subject, to inquire for a few minutes into the present state of knowledge respecting the ultimate constitution of matter, and the attitude of chemist and physicist with respect to it. It is in this that the main interest of radium lies. From its extreme rarity it can never be of corporal use to man, but its importance to science cannot be measured from this standpoint any more than the historian would estimate the importance of a Napoleon from his weight in the scales. Its properties have produced profound disturbances in the philosophies, for it has been largely instrumental in bringing about a partition of the atom.

Unfortunately the physicist's ideas regarding the atom have been somewhat loose in the past; time was, and not long ago, when he indifferently used the term for the aggregation of atoms which is known to the chemist as a molecule; then came the period of the vortex atom; now he passes the chemist and fills his atoms with electrons. The chemist, on the other hand, has been precise in his conceptions of the ultimate constitution of matter; his atoms are indivisible, and to each is assigned a more or less exact number, the