Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In an interesting, but apparently largely unknown, paper [1] Halin has introduced the concept of a primitive set of vertices of a graph. This concept, or rather a slight modification of it, seems to provide the key to a new approach to the wrell-known and important class of graph-theoretical problems centering on the notion of separation. As is well known, if A, B, C are sets of vertices of a (non-oriented) graph X, C is said to separate A and B if and only if every AB-path in X contains a vertex of C.