

WOMEN IN CHEMISTRY 225 



persistence typical of the noblest representatives of her 

 race supported him during periods of doubt and despon- 

 dency and fanned his flagging spirits to new endeavor. It 

 can indeed be truthfully asserted that had it not been for 

 her penetrating intelligence, her tenacity of purpose and 

 her keenness of vision, which were never at fault, the great 

 victory which crowned their efforts would never have been 

 achieved. 1 



Compare their work with that which was accomplished 

 by their illustrious predecessors, Antoine Laurent Lavoi- 

 sier, and his wife, a century earlier. The latter, by their 

 discovery of and experiments with oxygen, were able to 

 explain the until then mysterious phenomena of combus- 

 tion and respiration and to coordinate numberless facts 

 which had before stood isolated and enigmatic. But the 

 reverse was the case in the discovery of that extraordinary 

 and uncanny element, radium. It completely subverted 

 many long-established theories and necessitated an entirely 

 new view of the nature of energy and of the constitution of 

 matter. A substance that seemed capable of emitting light 

 and heat indefinitely, with little or no appreciable change 

 or transformation, appeared to sap the very foundations of 

 the fundamental principle of the conservation of energy. 



iMme. Curie, in an article which she wrote shortly after her 

 discovery of radium, shows that she possesses a genius for inductive 

 science of the highest type. "It was at the close of the year 1897," 

 she writes, "that I began to study the compounds of uranium, the 

 properties of which had greatly attracted my interest. Here was a 

 substance emitting spontaneously and continually radiations similar 

 to Eontgen rays, whereas ordinarily, Eontgen rays can be produced 

 only in a vacuum tube with the expenditure of electrical energy. 

 By what process can uranium furnish the same rays without ex- 

 penditure of energy and without undergoing apparent modification? 

 Is uranium the only body whose compounds emit similar rays? Such 

 were the questions I asked myself; and it was while seeking to 

 answer them that I entered into the researches which have led to 

 the discovery of radium." Eadium and Radio-Activity in The Cen- 

 tury Magazine, for January*, 1904. 



