Abstract
I FIND it difficult to discover what reply Prof. Patterson expects to his courteous letter of April 26. From the two experiments which he cites I gather that he wishes to call in question the general proposition that anomalous rotatory dispersion in transparent media is due to the superposition of two normal rotations1 of opposite sign. He has, however, described these two experiments in such a way that it is difficult to believe that either Biot's or Tschugaeff's paper was before him when he wrote his letter. In particular, Biot's synthesis of an anomalous rotatory dispersion, by superposing two normal dispersions of opposite sign (C.R., 1836, 2, 540), does not depend, as he suggests, on the existence of an additive law of optical rotatory power in mixed liquids, since in the first instance the liquids were not mixed but were contained in two separate tubes, the superposition of rotations being purely optical. A precisely similar result was obtained when the two liquids were mixed, but there are no numerical data in the paper which would justify the assertion that Biot “found that the rotation dispersion of a mixed solution ... was identical with the sum of the dispersions of the same substances separately”; nor does my acceptance of the general proposition set out above depend on any such assumption.
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LOWRY, T. [Letters to Editor]. Nature 117, 787 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/117787a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/117787a0
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