THE THIRST OF SALTED WATER OR 

 THE IONS OVERBOARD 



By HENRY ARMSTRONG, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 



"A beautiful theory spoilt by a nasty, ugly little fact."— Huxley. 1 



"It is as risky for a chemist to apply mathematics as for a mathematician to lecture to 

 chemists : we should work in co-operation. ... All this hangs together but it lends no 

 support at all to the dynamically impossible theory that the ions are free." 



Fitzgerald, Helmholtz Memorial Lecture. 



The impassioned eloquence and unrivalled power of appreciating 

 natural beauty characteristic of the author of Modern Painters 

 are nowhere more apparent than in the opening lines of the 

 section " Of Truth of Water," in that work : 



Of all organic substances, acting in their own proper 

 nature and without assistance or combination, water is the most 

 wonderful. If we think of it as the source of all the change- 

 fulness and beauty which we have seen in clouds ; then as 

 the instrument by which the earth we have contemplated was 

 modelled into symmetry and its crags chiselled into grace ; then 

 as in the form of snow it robes the mountains it has made with 

 that transcendent light which we could not have conceived if we 

 had not seen ; then as it exists in the foam of the torrent — in the 

 iris which spans it, in the morning mist which rises from it, in 

 the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hanging shore, in 

 the broad lake and glancing river ; finally, in that which is to 

 all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable 

 power — the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea : 

 what shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, 

 for glory and for beauty or how shall we follow its eternal 

 changefulness of feeling ? It is like trying to paint a soul. 



If the painter who is called upon to deal with its surface 

 appearance alone cannot picture water, how shall the chemist 

 succeed in penetrating the hidden mysteries of its being ? And 

 yet, as it is his mission to display the soul in all things, the 

 attempt must be made : a careful study of Ruskin's idealism 



1 Vide Memories of my Life (Francis Galton). 

 638 



