152 EEVISIONS OF THE THEOEY OF ELECTROLYSIS. 



which has forever linked his name with the history of electro- 

 chemistry. 



Under more favorable conditions of birth, education, and sur- 

 roundings Grotthus might have become one of the most distinguished 

 investigators of his time. But in the autumn of 1807 lie felt com- 

 pelled to return to his ancestral estate and to busy himself with the 

 duties of manager. Here in the country, in a remote angle of 

 Lithuania, for the most part without literary associates, and laclving 

 often the most essential means of research, he wrung from nature 

 some of her well-concealed secrets and wrote nearly all his contribu- 

 tions to science. 



For years he suffered unspeakably from an incurable organic mal- 

 ady. The trouble increased from day to day, and finally reached such 

 an acute stage that he was brought to the rash decision to sever vol- 

 untarily the thread of life. He died in 1822 at the age of 37. 



The Grotthus theory of the mechanism of electrolysis does not 

 respond, as we now know, to the facts of later discovery. But since 

 for the first time it made comprehensible the physical possibility of 

 the phenomena of electrolytic decomposition it has enduring value. 



Grotthus conceived that a species of i3olarization is set up in the 

 water by electrical agency, so that the positively charged elements 

 are turned toward the negative electrode and the negatively charged 

 ones in the other direction. Also, that at the moment of separation 

 of the oxygen and hydrogen from each other a division of their 

 natural charge of electricity takes place, in some way not explained. 

 Attractions and repulsions follow ; also the continuous movement of 

 two streams of charged particles in opposite directions, through the 

 process of molecular interchanges or the exchange of partners whose 

 conjugal bond is chemical aflinitj^ Grotthus does not appear to have 

 got the conception that a current in an electrolyte is the convection 

 of positive and negative charges in opposite directions, but his theory 

 was directed toward the explanation of the most obvious and novel 

 fact that the products of the decomposition appear at widely dis- 

 tant points. He distinctly remarks that the j^rocess, as he conceives 

 it, involves decomposition at the electrodes only, where the current 

 passes between the electrode and the electrolyte. He says : 



I conclude, therefore, that if it were possible to produce in ^Yater a current 

 of galvanic electricity so that it should describe in it a complete circuit, all the 

 molecules of the liquid which are in this circuit would at the same instant 

 be decomposed and again refoi-med ; ^Yhence it follows that this water, although 

 it underlies the action of galvanism, would still always remain water. 



Grotthus had no consistent idea of the relation between the charges 

 carried by the components of a molecule and the passage of a current. 

 The current appeared to him only to align the molecular components, 



