THE UNSTABLE ELEMENTS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIII, Issue 7954, 1 February 1906, Page 7

THE UNSTABLE ELEMENTS.

The scientists who are investigating the properties of radium have -elicited that the mysterious element eventually resolves it3eli' into one of the heavy metals, suen as gold or lead. This view was put forward Dy Professor Rutherford some time ago and lately it has been accepted by other and prominent scientists. If it is true that radium, after its series of extraordinary obanges from one rare element to another appears as gold, it would bo a fair assumption that this also was merely a stage. Professor Frederick Soddy, of the Glasgow University, has come forward with a statement that gold, and probaby lead also, are not stable elements, but are changing as they might be expected to do if they were radium products. In an article in tho soiontiQo journal, "Nature," the professor state 3 that after a visit to the gold deposits of Western Australia and New Zealand, and as a result of the information placed at his disposal, bo has become oonvinced that gold is the produot of some parent element, and is itself changing to produce "offspringing" elements. Professor Soddy is now endeavouring to secure permission to experiment with the huge gold reserve in the Bank of 'Eoglaud. "I confess to a feeling of impatience," ho writes, "to the sense of inadequacy of tLe single lifetime in my experiments on suoh small quantities of gold as 1 can purchase, when, disintegrating at the same rate, if disintegrating at all. tons of gold are lying useless in the national bank, their secret possibly one that it much concerns the race to knowguarded from knowledge by every a cunning invention that the art of man may devise." Following up bis article, Mr Donald Murray, another scientist, suggest* that silver is the product of lead. "A lead mine," he writes, "is a silver mine, and h silver mine a lead mine nil the world over, and yet the chemical attraction between silver and lead is slight, and the two metals are not sufficiently common to concur by change. Lead happens to present special facilities for experiment to test this surmise. It is cbeap, and it Ji9 a comparatively inexpensive matter to free ten tons of lead from all traces of silver by the usual crystallising process, and then put it aside for ten years and test again for silver by the same process." It is a suggestive fact that silver is never found without minute traces of gold.