Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/45

Rh changes must belong to the domain of inorganic chemistry. It is true that the methods of investigation are borrowed from the physical chemist; but the products lie in the province of the inorganic chemist. Indeed, the different departments of chemistry are so interlaced that it is impossible to pursue investigations in any one branch without borrowing methods from the others; and the inorganic chemist must be familiar with all chemistry, if he is to make notable progress in his own branch of the subject. And if the substances and processes investigated by the inorganic chemist are destined to become commercially important, it is impossible to place the manufacture on a sound commercial basis without ample knowledge of physical methods, and their application to the most economical methods of accelerating certain reactions and retarding others, so as to obtain the largest yield of the required product at the smallest cost of time, labor and money.

I have endeavored to sketch some of the aspects of inorganic chemistry with a view to suggesting problems for solution, or at least the directions in which such problems are to be sought. But the developments of recent years have been so astonishing and so unexpected, that I should fail in my duty were I not to allude to the phenomena of radioactivity, and their bearing on the subject of my address. It is difficult to gauge the relative importance of investigations in this field; but I may be pardoned if I give a short account of what has already been done, and point out lines of investigation which appear to me likely to yield useful results.

The wonderful discovery of radium by Madame Curie, the preparation of practically pure compounds of it, and the determination of its atomic weight are familiar to all of you. Her discovery of polonium, and Debierne's of actinium have also attracted much attention. The recognition of the radioactivity of uranium by Becquerel, which gave the first impulse to these discoveries, and of that of thorium by Schmidt, is also well known.

These substances, however, presented at first more interest for the physicist than the chemist, on account of the extraordinary power which they all possess of emitting 'rays.' At first, these rays were supposed to constitute ethereal vibrations; but all the phenomena were not explicable on that supposition. Schmidt first, and Rutherford and Soddy later, found that certain so-called 'rays' really consist of gases; and that while thorium emits one kind, radium emits another; and no doubt Debierne's actinium emits a third. The name 'emanations' was applied by Rutherford to such radioactive bodies; he and Soddy found that those of radium and thorium could be condensed and frozen by exposure to the temperature of liquid air, and that they were not destroyed or altered in any way by treatment with agents which are able to separate all known gases from those of the argon group, namely, red-hot magnesium-lime, and it was later found that sparking with oxygen in presence of caustic potash did not affect the