Note 57 — Chapter I · ON WATER AND ITS COMPOUNDS

Emulsions, like milk, are composed of a solution of glutinous or similar substances, or of oily liquids suspended in a liquid in the form of drops, which are clearly visible under a microscope, and form an example of a mechanical formation which resembles solution. But the difference from solutions is here evident. There are, however, solutions which approach very near to emulsions in the facility with which the substance dissolved separates from them. It has long been known, for example, that a particular kind of Prussian blue, KFe2(CN)6, dissolves in pure water, but, on the addition of the smallest quantity of either of a number of salts, it coagulates and becomes quite insoluble. If copper sulphide (CuS), cadmium sulphide (CdS), arsenic sulphide (As2S5) (the experiments with these substances proceed with great ease, and the solution obtained is comparatively stable), and many other metallic sulphides, be obtained by a method of double decomposition (by precipitating salts of these metals by hydrogen sulphide), and be then carefully washed (by allowing the precipitate to settle, pouring off the liquid, and again adding sulphuretted hydrogen water), then, as was shown by Schulze, Spring, Prost, and others, the previously insoluble sulphides pass into transparent (for mercury, lead, and silver, reddish brown; for copper and iron, greenish brown; for cadmium and indium, yellow; and for zinc, colourless) solutions, which may be preserved (the weaker they are the longer they keep) and even boiled, but which, nevertheless, in time coagulate—that is, separate in an insoluble form, and then sometimes become crystalline and quite incapable of re-dissolving. Graham and others observed the power shown by colloids (see note 18) of forming similar hydrosols or solutions of gelatinous colloids, and, in describing alumina and silica, we shall again have occasion to speak of such solutions.

In the existing state of our knowledge concerning solution, such solutions may be looked on as a transition between emulsion and ordinary solutions, but no fundamental judgment can be formed about them until a study has been made of their relations to ordinary solutions (the solutions of even soluble colloids freeze immediately on cooling below 0°, and, according to Guthrie, do not form cryohydrates), and to supersaturated solutions, with which they have certain points in common.