“…In the crystal structure of tetraaquabis(hydroxymethanesulfonato)magnesium(II), the sulfonate group and water molecules are involved in coordination (Cameron et al, 1990), whereas in the three other crystal structures, namely hexaaquamagnesiumbis(8-anilino-1-naphthalenesulfonate) hexahydrate (Cody & Hazel, 1977), hexaaqua(1,5-napthalenedisulfonato)magnesium (Cai et al, 2001) and the magnesium salt of 7-hydroxy-8-(phenylazo)-1,3-naphthalenedisulfonic acid (Ojala et al, 1994), the sulfonate groups are not involved in coordination and the metal atoms are surrounded only by water molecules. This has been observed in the ferron complexes of nickel (Raj et al, 2003), cobalt (Balasubramanian, 1995) and zinc (Francis et al, 2003b), and in the title compound, (I). In one type, the organic ligands are stacked over one another, each pair of adjacent members of the stack being inversion related.…”