344 BULLETIN OP THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. 



sessed by such solvents as are unsaturated in character. It has 

 been shown in this connection 1 that Briihl's position is unten- 

 able, inasmuch as some solvents, which according to Briihl's view 

 are unsaturated, and of which Briihl had predicted that they 

 would yield conducting solutions, were found to yield solutions 

 of high resistance. Later Briihl 2 has entered the objection that 

 he did not mean to assert that whenever a solvent possesses spare 

 valences it must necessarily yield conducting solutions. In 

 other words, he claims that he did not mean to assert the con- 

 verse of his original statement. Briihl cites in this connection 

 that the statement, that whenever a compound is optically active 

 it possesses an assymetric carbon atom, is also not necessarily 

 true when taken conversely. He apparently forgets, however, 

 that in our knowledge of racemic mixtures and meso compounds, 

 we have reasons why the converse of the latter statement is not 

 necessarily true. A corresponding reason why his own state- 

 ment should not hold in the converse has, however, not been 

 furnished by Briihl. 



The theory of electrolytic dissociation is at present at its best 

 in explaining the phenomena of actual electrolysis. But it 

 must nevertheless be admitted that there are important phenom- 

 ena of electrolysis which the theory does not explain satisfactor- 

 ily. Thus if when, for example, a silver solution is electro- 

 lyzed, the process consists in each case of neutralizing the posi- 

 tive charge residing on silver ions (as far as the process at the 

 cathode is concerned), as the theory claims, why do we always 

 get poorly adhering crystalline deposits from certain solutions 

 and dense, well-adhering deposits from others, the potential and 

 the current density being the same ? The writer has also ob- 

 served certain phenomena which appear to him to be incom- 

 patible with the idea that during the process of electrolysis there 

 is a regular procession of charged, oriented, material particles 

 in the solution. The study along this line is being pursued 

 further and it is hoped that the results may be ready for pub- 

 lication at some date in the near future. The study of the 



1 Kahlenberg and Lincoln, 1. c. 

 2 Zeit. phys. Cbem. 30, 1 (1899). 



