Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEMS OF SOLUTION " If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also ... is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity."—H. Von Helmholtz, "Faraday Lecture," 1881. To one inexperienced in the problems which confront the workers in the world of natural science, the whole question of solution and its attendant phenomena may appear, at first sight, of small account. Yet the study of these same phenomena, and the unravelling of their intricate connections, are of fundamental importance. Furthermore, as the work of the last twenty years has shown, the problems involved are of increasing interest, not only from the point of view of physics and chemistry, but also, and perhaps especially, from the physiological standpoint. More and more the reactions of inorganic substances, whether liquid or solid, are referred to their properties in a state of solution, while every process of life to be investigated by the biologist seems capable of interpretation onlythrough attention to the conditions thereby involved. Moreover, most chemical actions, especially those easily examined in the laboratory, occur between substances one or more of which are actually in the liquid state ; while the application of physical conceptions to the problems of living matter chiefly depends on the knowledge we possess of the physics and chemistry of ordinary solutions. The earliest investigations of the subject were of a chemical nature, and, till the passage of electric currents through liquids came to be examined at the beginning of the nineteenth century, little systematic study of the physical properties of solutions was made. But since that period there has been co...