With this demonstration open to everyone that has or
that may use a luminous dial watch for a few minutes a
night, of what is accomplished by the rays from only a
millionth of a gram of radium, and with only the weakest
of the rays, it will be of interest to read how Doctor Robert
Abbe, of New York City, one of the first physicians in
America to use Radium and to prove its value to the
medical profession, describes its action when applied by
the trained physician, to cancer:
“Now, let us consider cancer small or large.
With a small cancer we can see and study its
effects, and we find on applying a little Radium
to it, holding the radium over the cancer and
letting it bombard it with its peculiar qualities
or electrons, that with that bombardment, is
carried something that reduces that malignant
growth and devitalizes it, so the cells are reduced
to their normal growth; in other words, we have
cured the disease instead of simply removing it.”
The use that Madame Curie has announced she will
make of the Radium given her by the women of America
reminds us of the importance of what Radium offers for
the future of civilization, and why itis that Radium is the
most interesting material in the world.
We have seen that Madame Curie and her husband
proved to the scientific world that Radium is constantly
siving out heat, in quantities millions of times greater
than that obtainable from an equal quantity of coal. All
of the powerful resources of the modern laboratory, ex-
tremes of heat and of cold, and of pressure, violent chemical
reagents, the action of powerful explosives and the most
intense electrical agencies, do not affect this emission of
heat from Radium in the slightest degree.
Madame Curie wishes and hopes to find some new light
1pon the possibility of controlling this output of heat.
This can be accomplished best, as we now see it, by
finding some possible method to control or to influence the
breaking up of the atoms of Radium. For over a hundred
years the scientific world adhered to the belief and taught
that atoms are indestructible. Now it believes that it is
