The effects of a trace quantity of a surface-active agent on creeping flow past a bubble or droplet are investigated. The equations describing mass and momentum transfer are simultaneously solved by a perturbation technique, consistent with the jump mass and momentum batances a t the phase interface. The stream function for the velocity distribution is evaluated as an infinite series of spherical harmonics. Golerkin's method, which reduces the partial differential equation of continuity to a set of ordinary differential equations, is used to evaluate the concentration distribution of surfactant.A sample calculation is carried out for relative motion between an air bubble and an infinite body of water which contains a trace of isoamyl alcohol. The relative velocity of the water a t an infinite distance from the bubble is found to be highly sensitive to small changes in surfactant concentration from zero, although the bubble varies imperceptibly from a spherical shape.Consider a fluid globule which moves at a constant velocity under the action of gravity through a second immiscible phase. Hadamard and Rybczynski (1, p. 395) independently presented a solution to this problem which neglects interfacial effects, but their results failed to explain available experimental data for settling velocities.This led Boussinesq (2) to hypothesize that a skin which inhibits the internal circulation can form around a moving droplet. He described this quantitatively by a constitutive equation which expresses the stress in the interface as a linear function of the rate of deformation of the interface. This relationship, often called the Newtonian surface fluid model ( 3 to 6 ) , has two parameters in addition to surface tension: surface shear viscosity and surface dilatational viscosity. Acceptable laboratory measurements of these surface viscosities have not been obtained to date ( 7 ) . Boussinesq (2) obtained an exact solution for creeping flow past a droplet under the assumptions that interfacial behavior could be described by the Newtonian surface fluid model and that surface tension and the two surface viscosities were independent of position on the phase interface. The results of Boussinesq's analysis do not appear to be in any better agreement with available experimental data than those of Hadamard andNeither the analysis of Boussinesq nor the theory of Hadamard-Rybczynski considers the possible presence of surfactants (materials which have an affinity for a phase interface and which consequently alter the surface tension of a system). In practice it is very difficult to eliminate trace quantities of surface-active materials from an experiment. The observation of a fairly immobile cap on the trailing surface of a droplet ( 8 ) suggests that any surfaceactive agents present are not uniformly distributed around the surface, but rather that they are continuously swept toward the rear of the droplet by the fluid motion. If we express surface stress in terms of surface tension alone, the resultant accumulation of surfactants ...