The use of chemical potentials as indices of toxicity

Abstract

A number of investigation have been published in which attempts are made to correlate the chemical or physical properties of substances with the intensity of their toxic action. Among these may be instanced the work of Moore (1917) on the toxicity of fumigants towards insects, the extensive work of Tattersfield and his collaborators on contact insecticides and fumigants (Tattersfield and others 1920, 1925, 1926, 1927), the bacteriological investigations of Tilley ans Schaffer (1926, 1928) and others (Coulthard, Marshall and Pyman 1930; Dohme, Cox and Millar 1926; Klatman, Gatyas and Shternov 1931), work on fungicides (Morris and Stirk 1932; Stiles and Rees 1935). In each of the investigations just quoted a more or less wide range of chemical compounds was examined. The experiments consisted in the determination of the molar concentrations of the compounds which produced equi-toxic on a selected organism. The toxicities of the compounds studied were then usually assumed to be inversely proportional to the values of these equi-toxic concentrations.