Notes

Abstract

THE following telegram from the Paris correspondent of the Times appeared in the issue of that journal for February 16:—“Paris, February 15.—According to a communication made yesterday to the Academy of Sciences by M. Lippmann, Mme. Pierre Curie, the widow of M. Pierre Curie, the discoverer of polonium and radium, has at last succeeded in isolating one-tenth of a milligram of polonium. In order to obtain this result, Mme. Curie, working in cooperation with M. Debierne, has had to treat several tons of pitchblende with hot hydrochloric acid. The radio-active properties of polonium turn out to be far greater than those of radium. It decomposes chemically organic bodies with extraordinary rapidity. When it is placed in a vase made of quartz, which is one of the most refractory of substances, it cracks the vessel in a very short time. But a no less distinctive quality of polonium is the comparatively rapid rate at which it disappears. Whereas it takes one thousand years for radium to disappear completely, a particle of polonium loses 50 per cent, of its weight in 140 days. The products of its disintegration are helium and another body, the nature of which has not yet been ascertained, but Mme. Curie and M. Debierne are inclined to believe it to be lead. Its identity, however, will shortly be established, and at the same time science will have had the experimental proof of the transformation of a body which had been believed to be elementary.”