Abstract
MORE than seventy years ago Dalton made the assertion that gases, when absorbed by liquids (e.g., water), remain only mechanically included in the latter, without losing thereby any property which belongs to them as gases. This hypothesis of the nature of absorption is opposed by a still older one—the chemical —which considers the phenomenon as the consequence of an affinity between gases and liquids, and explains, for example, the absorption of CO2 and N2O by water by the formation of H2CO3 and HNO. Since the time when these two hypotheses were started, their proof has always been attempted with the aid of the statical method; i.e., by the determination of the proportion in which the absorbed and absorbing bodies maintain their equilibrium under given conditions; or, in other words, by the determination of the coefficients of absorption. Mackenzie, who in this way has lately most thoroughly examined into the absorption of carbonic acid by means of a solution of salt in water, says that it would be presumptuous, on the basis of existing observations, to attempt yet to solve the problem whether absorption is a purely physical phenomenon or whether it belongs rather to the domain of the so-called chemical phenomena.
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References
Wroblewski in Wiedemann's Annalen, ii., 481–513.
Wroblewski in Poggendorff's Annalen, clviii., 539–568.
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WROBLEWSKI, S. On the Nature of the Absorption of Gases . Nature 21, 190–192 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/021190a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/021190a0