“…Solvent effects on alkoxymercuration of styrenes were dealt with in several papers [3][4][5]; however, in all the cases they referred to alcohols or their mixtures with other solvents. Within their research work on kinetics and mechanism of methoxymercuration of styrenes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] and other alkenes [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], the authors have focused their attention especially on substituent effects [2,3,6,8,10,12], including the steric ones [10,12]; furthermore, to salt effects [14,15], temperature dependences of the reaction rate constant [1,2,6] and in the context with the abovementioned areas, also to the structure of the addition intermediate [3,4,[8][9][10][13][14][15][16]. From these studies it follows that methoxymercuration is an electrophilic reaction, whose rate-limiting step involves formation of an intermediate with an acetylmercuric cation asymmetrically bound to the carbon atoms of the styrene vinyl group.…”