The rules proposed by Lu et al. for the prediction of the most -difficult -to-separate pair of components in a mixture in gas chromatographic separation have been examined experimentally. A mixture of n-alkanes and n-alkyl benzenes is chromatographed on two columns coated with EGC and PEG 4000 respectively under various chromatographic conditions. The most-difficult-to-separate pair of components found in experiments are not in accordance with those predicted by Lu's rules. The discrepancies between theory ...