THE THIRST OF SALTED WATER 643 



commit their contents to memory and touching pitch he cannot 

 avoid defilement. The retirement of the censor of stage plays 

 would probably be welcomed by playwrights ; if he were charged 

 instead with the suppression of indecent scientific literature — 

 indecent through lack of logic and lack of most things worth 

 knowing — he might render a real service to society. 



After all, we scientific workers (or should it not rather be 

 said we workers in science ? because, although evil communi- 

 cations corrupt good manners, the work of science has not, as 

 a necessary consequence, the establishment in the worker of a 

 scientific habit of mind), like women, are the victims of fashion : 

 at one time we wear dissociated ions, at another electrons ; and 

 we are always loth to don rational clothing; some fixed belief 

 we must have manufactured for us : we are high or low church, 

 of this or that degree of nonconformity, according to the school 

 in which we are brought up — but the agnostic is always rare 

 among us and of late years the critic has been taboo. The 

 poor student is usually the sore afflicted victim of our whims. 

 Instead of setting him to read sound literature, such as the 

 Life of Faraday by Bence Jones and even Faraday's researches, 

 so that he might appreciate the spirit in which work has been 

 done in the past, we administer the latest tips in mild doses : the 

 poor creature's mental digestion is horribly upset and his morals 

 remain lax — but what matters it ? he can use stilted paraphrase 

 in place of the studied simplicity of older times and is up to date, 

 although perhaps he has no knowledge of fundamentals. Our 

 modern methods of teaching are pretentious and too often 

 fraudulent. We need to realise this and to change our ways. 



When alcohol is mixed with water what really happens? 

 When sugar or salt is dissolved, what is the effect produced ? 

 In all cases, whatever is dissolved in it, the properties of the 

 solvent water are profoundly modified — its freezing point being 

 lowered but its boiling point raised, although in different 

 degrees when the substances are used in proportions corre- 

 sponding to their formulae, C 2 H 6 0, C 12 H 22 O n , NaCl, the effect 

 produced in weak solutions by the salt being about 175 times as 

 great as that produced by either alcohol or sugar. The solution 

 of salt, moreover, differs from the solutions of the two other 

 substances in that it is an electrolyte — capable, that is to say, of 

 conducting an electric current. 



