. 



Cryoscopic Relations of Solutions of Cane-Sugar, §c. 383 



millions, in order to sum up what may be accomplished by all 

 the encounters of all the molecules within one cubic micron * 

 of gas in the ten-thousandth part of a second, and that we 

 may in some degree understand how it comes to pass that 

 opportunity is afforded in nature for accomplishing work 

 which requires rare collocations of conditions that can but 

 seldom emerge. Such is Nature's real laboratory — events in 

 inconceivable numbers, the whole phantasmagoria of these 

 innumerable events changing every instant down to its 

 minutest details with inconceivable rapidity, the changes in 

 most cases kept within limits, but in some exploring every 

 part of a wide range : it is thus that those wonderful opera- 

 tions are carried on, which issue in the astonishing results 

 that lie everywhere in such profusion around us. We seem 

 almost to get an obscure and partial glimpse of how, in 

 organic nature, tasks of the most unlikely kind are accom- 

 plished, through the needful opportunities now and then 

 turning up within each tiny speck of so Protean a material 

 as protoplasm, a body of which the mutations have probably 

 time-relations of the same order as those we have been en- 

 deavouring to illustrate, and whose activities are therefore 

 more incessant, more various, and more complex, within 

 every thousandth of a second, in every speck and corner of 

 each living cell, than the mind can even conceive. It is very 

 little man yet knows of what is going on abundantly about 

 him in every stick and stone. 



XXXI. On the Cryoscopic Relations of Dilute Solutions of 

 Cane-Sugar and Ethyl Alcohol. By Harry C. JoNESf. 



rp T 2 



J^ HAT the van't HoffJ equation ^ = 002 ^r does not hold 



for the lowering of the freezing-point of water produced by 

 the presence of a very small amount of such a non-electrolyte 

 as cane-sugar, is indicated by the work of Arrhenius§, 

 Raoult||, Loomis% myself**, and others. While the mole- 

 cular lowerings for dilute solutions of several non-electro- 

 lytes as found by Loomis are less than the calculated, the 



* There are 70 or 80 cubic microns in the volume of each of the small 

 disks in human blood. 



t Communicated by the Author. 

 X Tteit.f.phys. Chem. i. p. 497. 



§ Ibid. ii. p. 495. l| Ibid. ix. p. 343. 



5[ Ber. d. deutsch. chem. Gesell. xxvi. p. 797. 

 ** Phil. Mag. xxxvi. p. 465 (1893) ; Zeit.f. phys. Chem. xii. p. 642. 



