2 vols. xiii, [1], 426; [4], 548 pp. With 7 plates demonstrating experimental evidence; heliogravure portrait of Pierre Curie. 9½x5¾, period half calf & marbled boards, marbled endpapers. First Edition.

First edition of the collected lectures of Madame Curie at the Sorbonne, with additional material added for book publication. Marie Curie, nee Sklodowska, 1867-1934, arrived in Paris from her native Poland in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics, in 1894 and in the following year they were married. "She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914. Her early researches, together with her husband, were often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium. Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular" - (Nobel Prize site). Honeyman 2:789; Sparrow, Milestones of Science, 41. Laid into the present copy is a John Howell-Books typed catalogue entry, dated 1977.