The phenomenon is evidently connected with diffusion.  If water is very carefully poured on to alcohol, the two layers, separate at first, mingle by degrees till a homogeneous substance is obtained.  The bladder seems not to have prevented this diffusion from taking place, but it seems to have shown itself more permeable to water than to alcohol.  May it not therefore be supposed that there must exist dividing walls in which this difference of permeability becomes greater and greater, which would be permeable to the solvent and absolutely impermeable to the solute?  If this be so, the phenomena of these semi-permeable walls, as they are termed, can be observed in particularly simple conditions.

The answer to this question has been furnished by biologists, at which we cannot be surprised.  The phenomena of osmosis are naturally of the first importance in the action of organisms, and for a long time have attracted the attention of naturalists.  De Vries imagined that the contractions noticed in the protoplasm of cells placed in saline solutions were due to a phenomenon of osmosis, and, upon examining more closely certain peculiarities of cell life, various scholars have demonstrated that living cells are enclosed in membranes permeable to certain substances and entirely impermeable to others.  It was interesting to try to reproduce artificially semi-permeable walls analogous to those thus met with in nature;[15] and Traube and Pfeffer seem to have succeeded in one particular case.  Traube has pointed out that the very delicate membrane of ferrocyanide of potassium which is obtained with some difficulty by exposing it to the reaction of sulphate of copper, is permeable to water, but will not permit the passage of the majority of salts.  Pfeffer, by producing these walls in the interstices of a porous porcelain, has succeeded in giving them sufficient rigidity to allow measurements to be made.  It must be allowed that, unfortunately, no physicist or chemist has been as lucky as these two botanists; and the attempts to reproduce semi-permeable walls completely answering to the definition, have never given but mediocre results.  If, however, the experimental difficulty has not been overcome in an entirely satisfactory manner, it at least appears very probable that such walls may nevertheless exist.[16]

[Footnote 15:  See next note.—­ED.]

[Footnote 16:  M. Stephane Leduc, Professor of Biology of Nantes, has made many experiments in this connection, and the artificial cells exhibited by him to the Association francaise pour l’avancement des Sciences, at their meeting at Grenoble in 1904 and reproduced in their “Actes,” are particularly noteworthy.—­ED.]