Thus the recognition of the fact that a substance in solution is really a gas, has at a single stroke put us in possession of the laws of osmotic pressure—laws slowly and laboriously discovered by the long series of investigations on the pressure of gases.
Osmotic pressure plays a most important rôle in the arena of life. It is found at work in all the phenomena of life. When osmotic pressure fails, life itself ceases.
CHAPTER III
ELECTROLYTIC SOLUTIONS
Solutions which conduct Electricity.—The laws of solution which we have studied in the previous chapter apply only to those solutions, chiefly of organic origin, which do not conduct electricity. Solutions of electrolytes such as the ordinary salts, acids, and bases, which are ionized on solution, give values for the various constants of solution which do not accord with those required by theory. If, for instance, we take a gramme-molecule of an electrolyte such as chloride of sodium, and dissolve it in a litre of water, we find that the lowering of the freezing point is nearly double the theoretical value of 1.85°. The same holds good for the osmotic pressure, and for all the constants which are proportional to the molecular concentration of the solute. The solution behaves, in each case, as if it contained more than one gramme-molecule of sodium chloride per litre. It behaves, in fact, as if it contained i times the number of molecules of solute originally introduced into it. If n be the original number of molecules, then it will apparently contain n′ = in molecules. This law is universal for all electrolytic solutions; the theoretical value for their concentration, osmotic pressure, and all the proportional physical constants must be multiplied by this quantity, i = n′/n, which is the ratio of the apparent number of the molecules present to the number originally introduced.
A similar dissociation of the molecule is observed in the case of many gases. The vapour of chloride of ammonium, for instance, is decomposed by heat, and it may be shown experimentally that the increase of pressure on heating above
that which theory demands, is due to an increase in the number of the gaseous molecules present. Some of the vapour particles are dissociated into two or more fragments, each of which plays the part of a single molecule.
Arrhenius, in 1885, advanced the hypothesis that the apparent increase in the number of molecules of an electrolytic solution was also due to dissociation. This interpretation at once threw a flood of light on a number of phenomena hitherto obscure.