The conception that substances exist which carry both positive and negative charges in the same molecule was first advanced by Bredig (1894) and Kiister (1897) in connection with betaine and methyl orange respectively. Kiister designated such substances zwitterions; since, however, these particular compounds fail to exhibit the essential ionic property of migration in an electric field they should rather be called zwittermolecules.Later Bredig (1899) extended the conception to the aliphatic amino-acids, and the theory was again taken up in an interesting paper by Adams (1916); the most convincing arguments in its favour were, however, supplied by Bjerrum (1923). In the meantime the results of many investigations had afforded additional support for the hypothesis ; the more essential of these have been discussed by Richardson (p. 121) and may be summarized as follows.(1) The zwitterion theory explains the positions occupied by the dissociation constants of the amino-acids in relation to those of the corresponding aliphatic acids, amines and esters (Adams, 1916 ; Bjerrum, 1923 ;Ebert, 1925 ; Emer son and Kirk, 1930); no such reasonable explanation is available on the older theory.on May 10, 2018 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ Downloaded from