European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,

between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he

was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a

savage appetite tounderstand. He had been particularly attracted

by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness

to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his

reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing

among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm

blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,

dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects

very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with theeffect

of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then

the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir

William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium

particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,

induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a

happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate

thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have

been taken by these curiosities.

Section 8

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at

Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a

course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in

Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very

considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small

lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his

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