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Once more we refer you to the nine octave chart. To describe radium is to describe them all, for their effects are the same. One should know them all, however. Practically all of the deadly

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killers are on the red side of the spectrum. You will gleam the reason for this in later chapters. They begin with three silvery white metals on the lowest of the radioactive octaves, the silicon octave. The first two are sodium and magnesium. Sodium will set water on fire and burn its oxygen out, if you throw a lump of it in water. One small pinhead of it as a free metal will kill you, but when deprived of its metal quality by union with chlorine you need it in minute quantities in your body. It is table salt. Magnesium is the familiar flashlight of photography. Naturally its radioactivity will kill you if taken into your body in its free state, yet you need a minute fraction of it as a mineral salt. Aluminum has such a density that its radio-active powers need not be feared in that octave, but in its succeeding octaves it gradually becomes more deadly than radium. Its highest form is actinium, which is an element between radium and uranium.

The sodium series, including lithium, potassium, rubidium, caesium and an unknown element one octave higher, are in the deadly class, especially because of their power to destroy oxygen by expanding it with such quick death that it bursts into flame. This effect is so little understood that a brief example will simplify it. If you touch a match to oxygen you will get a hot flame. If you compress oxygen into a liquid and then touch a match to it you will get a hotter flame, for you have multiplied its speed and expansion by multiplying its compression.

Sodium, calcium or potassium multiply the expansion of oxygen in its gaseous form and give forth the heat that liquid oxygen would give. Likewise, oxygen is multiplied in its heat-giving power if united with calcium-carbide to create an oxyacetylene flame. Consider the deadliness of potassium in this respect by the following example. You will find potassium one octave above sodium. You very freely take carbon and nitrogen into your body. They are two of your five essential elements. If you add a minute amount of potassium to them, however, you produce cyanide of potassium, a deadly quick electrocuting poison. This is an example of what a minute quantity of radio-active matter would do if added to the essentials of our blood

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plasma. That is why leukemia, birth deformities and impotence will be the forerunners of greater scourges to come.

We will again leave these thoughts in abeyance until they are more completely tied together at the end of the book.

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