Ill 



tion, while to complete haemolysis of 2 % blood only 

 2 cc. solution are necessary, and not 6 cc. as would be 

 necessary in the case of proportionality. Thus the hae- 

 molysis behaves almost as the process of dissolving of 

 different metalhvdrates in ammonia or caustic soda. In 



j 



the latter case a part of the hydrate is precipitated 

 through dilution with water, which indicates that in 

 diluted solution a relatively greater amount of base is 

 required to dissolve a certain amount of hydrate. In the 

 case of haemolysis the process can naturally only take 

 one direction, an already dissolved blood corpuscle not 

 being able to become a corpuscle again by dilution with 

 water. When a base is added, in a quantity proportio- 

 nate to the number of blood corpuscles, the haemolysis 

 extends only to a certain limit, comprising a certain 

 fraction of the blood corpuscles present, and this frac- 

 tion increases with their quantity, the quantity of water 

 being constant. The process seems in many respects 

 analogous to precipitation through a base of a metal- 

 salt, for insl. aluminium chloride. At the commence- 

 ment, for the formation of the precipitate, an amount of 

 base is consumed, which is in proportion to the amount 

 of salt, and later on the precipitate is dissolved through 

 a further addition of base, in which case, as above 

 mentioned, the hydrolysis has the effect that the quan- 

 tity of base necessary for solution of a certain quantity 

 of precipitate increases with the quantity of water 

 present. 



In the last tables a great many examples are found 

 indicating that with the same amount of alkali a maximum 

 of haemolysis always occurs with a certain amount of 

 blood. In the case of sodium hydrate such a maximum 

 is very near the amount which corresponds to total 

 haemolysis when as much blood as possible is added. 



21 



