TOPICAL PORTRAIT SERIES.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXIX, Issue 113, 16 May 1906, Page 1

TOPICAL PORTRAIT SERIES.

THf LATE fnOFESSOR CURIE

AND HIS HIS UNTIMELY ENDING THE RESULT OF AN ACCIDENT.

! Very little was said in regard to the death of Professor.Curie, and yet no more important scientist has flourished in the last fifty years. Crushed under a dray wheel, it was a very untimely ending to such a distinguished life, arid prohably some writers would say more—the man who wrested from Nature one of her greatest secrets perishes beneath a common waggon tyre, a vulgar accident and a squalid, but as Hamlet said of his wound, still one to suffice. But the Professor, to be just, was only the half discoverer of radium, for his better half worked out an equal half and so is bracketed with him for immortality. The two worked as scientists together, and largely as a result of the discovery by Becquerel of uranium. When they 1 announced their triumph to the world it became the most talked of thing since the X-Ray, and scientific writers juggled with its possibilities a.ttd saw in radium the philosopher's stone of research and discovery. M. and Mme. Curie wove honored by the world and especially honored by the Learned Societies of Paris and London, and in 1903 they shared the Nobel prize for physics, Becquerel getting a third for his previous observations- Radium since then has died out a little, but only from the public mind. Every day scientific men have befit in their laboratories dipping into the Book of Mysteries by aid of its magic light and seeking a revelation in regard to its nature and ultimate, limits. For radium has been proved to be the cure of certain previously considered incurable diseases, the mysterious incomprehensible cure but the cure all the same. It is a precious commodity in all senses, and, most regrettably, most precious in the sense ot its scarcity. There is go very little radium in the world that what there is of it makes gold cheap and rubies paltry in comparison, and the man is yet to appear v?ho can show the way to a reasonable increase of the stock. %dium has mastered lupus, doctors declare, and has been shown to haye some power in the case of consumption. But it is in respect to cancer that science hopes for the greatest, that terrible mysterious disease which has bafflled all, both as to its nature and its actual genesis. The world lias lost a great man in M. Curie and humanity a great servant. Probably there is a good dispensation in all things, even in this, but the human mind, that has closer limitations thai. Shakespeare confessed to, realises chiefly the probjem of the axiom.