On supporting science journalism
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The constant effort of science to overcome natural laws as well as to apply them must be recognized. A few years ago, at a meeting in New York, a gentleman was deploring the fact that we did not allow nature's laws to have full play; that we were constantly antagonizing nature at the expense of the welfare of the human race. Mr. Abram Hewitt answered this pernicious doctrine by saying that if nature had been allowed to take its course, grass would still be growing in Broadway. Are metals made radio-active by the influence of radium radiation? This is a question which Prof. Thomson, F.R.S., answered in a communication made to the Cambridge Philosophical Society recently. From experiments made on lead, brass, and tin, it was shown that these bodies, after exposure to radium radiation, exhibit no trace of radio-activity four minutes after the radiation has ceased to fall upon them; there was no evidence of induced activity of any kind, but the method'used was not adapted for testing the existence of a very short-lived radio-activity. Cuvier, the naturalist, while a young man incurred the enmity of certain of his colleagues, who decided to give him a severe fright by dressing one of their number in the conventional garb of Satan and making a midnight call upon him. It is presumable that being aroused from a sound sleep, Cuvier was duly impressed with the figure before him and that some of the threats made were having the desired effect. But finally, in a last effort to overwhelm him, the devil threatened to eat the young scientist. This was a fatal mistake, for Cuvier, at once reassured, eyed the grotesquely-clad figure from head to toe and exclaimed, What, horns and hoofs and carnivorous! Never! He then rolled over and went to sleep.
