Combination
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in law, a combination to commit a crime is an indictable CONSPIRACY (q. v.). A combination to commit an act which is injurious, immoral, or contrary to public policy, is in some but not in all cases held to amount to conspiracy. Combinations of workmen to raise the rate of wages were formerly unlawful; but the law was amended in this respect in 1825, and now such combinations are freely per- COMBRETACEÆ jor, Canes Venatici, Boötes, Virgo, and mitted, provided they effect their purposes by lawful means. In mathematics, the different collections which may be made of certain given quantities without regard to the order in which they are arranged in each collection. The term is almost always mentioned in conjunction with permutations in which there is regard to the order of the quantities, and a department of arithmetic is technically called Permutations and Combinations. If a, b, and c be three quantities to be taken two together, there will be three possible Combinations, that is, ways of arranging them in pairs, without allowing b to stand before a, or c before the two letters which precede it in the alphabet. These combinations will be ab, ac, and be. But there can be six permutations of the same three letters, 1. e., six distinct pairs of them if permission be granted to put them in any order one pleases, viz., ab, ba, ac, ca, bc, cb. In chemistry, the act of uniting by means of chemical affinity; the state of being so united. There are two kinds of chemical combination, that by weight and that by volume. In a large number of instances the law relating to Combination by weight is as follows: When two bodies, A and B, are capable of uniting, the several quantities of B, which combine with a given or constant quantity of A, stand to one another in very simple ratios. With regard to gases combining by volume, the law is that the combining volumes of all elementary gases are equal, excepting those of phosphorus and arsenic, which are only half those of the other elements in the gaseous state, and those of mercury and cadmium, which are double those of the other elements.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The mathematics is untouched: the count of combinations of a, b, c taken two at a time is still three, and permutations and combinations are still taught much as Collier's set them out in 1921. The law has moved a great deal further. Collier's notes that combinations of workmen were unlawful until the statute of 1825; since then collective bargaining has been protected outright, by Britain's Trade Disputes Act of 1906 and, in the United States, by the Clayton Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, while the word combination survives in the criminal sense chiefly in antitrust law, as in the Sherman Act's ban on every contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade. The chemistry is the most dated part: the odd exceptions Collier's lists, phosphorus and arsenic with half the usual combining volume and mercury and cadmium with double, are not exceptions at all but simply reflect molecular size, since phosphorus and arsenic vapours go about as four-atom molecules while mercury and cadmium vapours are single atoms.
Written for this edition, 2026.