Bewitched is an odd word with which to begin a chemical textbook. Yet
that is a fair description of how I reacted on first leaming of ion
exchange and imagining what might be done with it. That initial
fascination has not left me these many years later, and it has provided
much ofthe motivation for writing this book. The perceived need for a
text on the fundamentals of ion chromatography provided the rest. Many
readers will have a general idea of what ion chromatography is and what
it does. Briefly, for those who do not, it is an umbrella term for a
variety of chromatographie methods for the rapid and sensitive analysis
of mixtures of ionic species. It has become highly developed in the last
decade, and while it is now routinely used for the determination of
organic as weH as inorganic ions, its initial impact was greatest in the
area of inorganic analysis. In the past the determination of inorganic
ions, particularly anions, meant laborious, time-con- suming, and often
not very sensitive "wet chemieal" methods. In the last ten years that
has changed radically as ion chromatography has supplanted these older
methods.