The specific conductivity of solutions of oxyhæmoglobin

When preparing a paper on the mechanism of hæmolysis two or three years ago my attention was accidentally called to a statement in a paper by the late Prof. A. Gamgee in the ‘Proceedings’ of the Royal Society, that “although solutions of oxyhæmoglobin possess a low conductivity this is very much higher than has been found in the previous observations of Stewart.” In a note appended to my paper I suggested that this could only mean “that either his (Gamgee’s) oxyhæmoglobin or his distilled water was less thoroughly freed from electrolytes than mine. In observations of this kind the error must appear as too high and not as too low a conductivity.” Prof. Gamgee having laid stress on the purity of his distilled water and oxyhæmoglobin, this result seemed very puzzling, all the more as my object in determining the conductivity of some specimens of oxyhæmoglobin was merely to control their suitability for addition to blood in the determination of the relative volume of corpuscles and plasma by a colorimetric method described in the paper, and no such effort has been made to carry the exclusion of foreign electrolytes to the practically possible limit as would have been deemed indispensable had the conductivity of hæmoglobin been investigated for its own sake.