3yi THE WOELD OF LIFE 



Water: its relations to Life and to Man 



The compound water is as essential for building up living 

 organisms as is carbon, and it exhibits peculiarities almost 

 as striking as those of that element. Its more obvious quali- 

 ties are singularly unlike those of its components, oxjgen and 

 hydrogen : oxygen supports combustion, water checks or destroys 

 it; hydrogen burns readily, water is incombustible. Water is 

 wonderfully stable at ordinary temperatures, hence it is the 

 most innocuous of fluids ; it is also an almost universal solvent, 

 hence its great value in cookery, in the arts, and for cleansing 

 purposes. Besides being absolutely essential for vegetable and 

 animal life it has qualities which render it serviceable to civil- 

 ised man, both in his pleasures and his scientific discoveries. 

 Absolutely pure water is a non-conductor of electricity; but as 

 all natural waters contain gases or salts in solution, it then be- 

 comes a conductor, and is partly decomposed, or becomes an 

 electrolyte. The various curious facts connected with water 

 are so puzzling, that in April 1910 the Faraday Society held 

 a general discussion in order to arrive at some solution of what 

 is termed in the Electrical Review " the most complex of prob- 

 lems." One of the facts that seem to be now generally 

 accepted is, that water is not the simple compound, H2O, it 

 is usually held to be, but is really a compound of three hydrols, 

 II2O being gaseous water, (H20)3 being ice, while liquid water 

 is a mixture of these or (H20)2. 



Professor H. E. Armstrong put forward this view in 1908, 

 and in the Address already quoted he says: 



" Although it is generally admitted that water is not a uniform 

 substance but a mixture of units of different degrees of molecular 

 complexity, the degree of complexity and the variety of forms is' 

 probably under-estimated, and little or no attention has been paid 

 to the extent to which alterations produced by dissolving substances 

 in it may be the outcome and expression of changes in the water 

 itself." 



