THE THIRST OF SALTED WATER 645 



regarded as conditioned by occasional violent kinetic collisions 

 between the molecules. But his point of view was that from 

 which the classical baby in Marryat's novel was apologised for — 

 as being only a little one. It was not until 1883 that Arrhenius 

 came forward as a Whole-Hogger and, in order to account for 

 the increase in the molecular conductivity on diluting the 

 solution of a dissolved salt, assumed that the dissociation might 

 be complete or nearly so. His conception did not become 

 known until late in 1885 and even then did not " catch on." 

 The way had to be prepared and salted, as chemists were 

 still possessed of some sanity of judgment. 



In 1885, Van't Hoff, assuming the character of the Hatter, 

 invited us to a scientific Mad Tea Party, at which he out-hatted 

 the Hatter by gravely assuring us that " I see what I eat " zvas 

 the same thing as "I eat what I see": introducing us into 

 topsyturvydom, he insisted that a liquid was to be treated not 

 as a liquid but as a gas ; that the attractive forces in play 

 between the molecules of solute and solvent were not really 

 attractions : the solute was to be thought of as banging about 

 and hitting things, as though it were gasified. Even this did not 

 mislead us, mainly because, although, in the case of cane sugar, 

 Pfeffer's pressure values — when looked at upside-down — were 

 in accordance with the gas pressure hypothesis, salt again 

 behaved in an irrational way, producing nearly double the 

 effect of sugar. 



But here Arrhenius got his chance and being a good sports- 

 man he soon took it, coming forward with the suggestion that 

 the number of molecules in the solution of salt was nearly twice 

 as great as had been supposed, owing to the dissociation of the 

 salt into its ions. The combination of Van't Hoffs great reputa- 

 tion as the author of the asymmetric carbon hypothesis with 

 Arrhenius's juvenile enthusiasm was irresistible : with the aid 

 of floods of Ostwaldian ink, the joke soon spread far outside. 

 The mistake has been made in our own time, therefore we 

 must admit the possibility of making it ; but it is none the less 

 difficult to understand how a man of Van't Hoffs genius could 

 possibly have been misled by the observation of a parallelism 

 into the assumption of any actual resemblance between gaseous 

 pressure and the peculiar conditions of stress in a solution. 



Both in my address in 1885 to the Chemical Section of the 

 British Association and in my communication to the Royal 



