Sir William Ramsay, lecturing on stars and atoms at a
meeting of the British Astronomical Society on Wednesday, made a curious announcement with regard to radium. It appears that Messrs. Johnson, Matthey, and Co., platinum manufacturers, refiners and assayers to the Mint and the Bank of England, who were formerly engaged in extracting uranium from uranium ore, were in the habit, up to thirty years back, of throwing away the residuum in enormous quantities. This residuum, which contains radium, is now "lying somewhere in the dustheaps of London." Sir William Ramsay was careful to add that the amount would be very small, otherwise the rush to the dustheaps would be some- thing alarming. In the course of the same lecture Sir William Ramsay put forward a new theory to account for the aurora borealis,—viz., that it is caused by a discharge of minute corpuscles or electrons shot out from the sun, which impinged on the upper layers of the atmosphere and electrified it.
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