The rate of disintegration of radium is relatively slow; it has been calculated that the time required for half of any given quantity of radium to change completely into other products is about 2000 years. Rutherford has calculated that in 26,000 years a kilogram of radium would be reduced to one milligram of active substance, the remainder having passed into degradation products.
In 1899 Debierne announced the existence of another radio-active element contained in uranium minerals, which he termed _actinium_. This is probably a disintegration product of uranium and identical with the _emanium_ of Giesel. It occurs associated with the rare earths which can be separated from the pitch-blende residues, and is eventually found in the lanthanum salts. Nothing is known as to its atomic weight or its chemical relationships. It undergoes change, and forms, apparently, a gaseous emanation which rapidly disintegrates and can be condensed to a liquid at a low temperature. Four other successive products have been identified by the character of the radiation they emit, their degradation constants, and the time required for one half of any given quantity to disintegrate into other forms of matter.
_Thorium_ was shown to contain a radio-active element by Mme. Curie and Schmidt, independently, in 1898. Whether thorium is itself active is doubtful. The rate of disintegration of _radio-thorium_ is probably greater than that of uranium. It, too, seems to form a gaseous emanation which can be condensed at the temperature of liquid air and appears to be an inert gas of high molecular weight with the characteristics of the argon family.
The type of radiation emitted by the several products has been observed, and their constants of change and half-value periods calculated; but little or nothing is known at present concerning their atomic weights, spectroscopic or chemical characters.
ATOMS AND MOLECULES: ATOMIC WEIGHTS AND EQUIVALENTS
It has already been pointed out that the discovery by Gay Lussac, and independently by Dalton, that gases combine in simple proportions by volume, and that the volume of the gaseous product, measured under comparable conditions of temperature and pressure, stand in simple relation to the volumes of the constituents, seemed to most of Dalton’s contemporaries, but not to Dalton himself, to afford strong evidence of the validity of his explanation of the essential nature of chemical combination. It appeared obvious from the facts that there must exist some simple relation between the densities, or specific gravities, of the elementary gases and their atomic weights. When, however, the principle underlying Gay Lussac’s law was extended so as to include gases in general—both simple and compound—difficulties were met with which were only satisfactorily cleared away during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first rational attempt to explain the facts observed by Dalton and Gay Lussac, concerning the volumetric relations of gases, was made in 1813 by Amedeo Avogadro by the assumption that a given volume of all gases—simple or compound—contains the same number of integral molecules; hence the relative weights of these volumes represent the relative weights of the molecules. According to Avogadro, in the case of the simple gases the integral molecules are composed of a certain number of elementary molecules of _the same kind_, whereas the integral molecules of compound gases and vapours are made up of elementary molecules _of different kinds_. The _elementary molecule_ of Avogadro is now termed the _atom_; his _integral molecule_ we call simply a _molecule_. Similar conceptions were published independently by Ampère in 1814. It follows from the doctrine of Avogadro and Ampère that, as the number of integral molecules is the same in equal volumes of all gases, these molecules must be equidistant from each other, their mutual distances depending upon pressure and temperature. This at once serves to explain the laws of Boyle and Dalton that gases, no matter what their chemical nature, behave identically, as regards change of volume, when compressed by pressure or expanded by heat.