We shall call a linear function on the elements of a ring R skew-symmetric if it vanishes whenever at least two of the variables are equal. Here we shall study rings R of characteristic not 2 which satisfy the following two identities:

1

(2)is skew-symmetric.

Both of these identities hold in alternative rings. The fact that F(w, x, y, z) is skew-symmetric in alternative rings is an important tool in the study of such rings. It is also obvious that both identities hold in commutative rings. But unlike other recent generalizations of commutative and alternative rings it turns out that there exist simple, finite dimensional algebras of degree two which are neither alternative nor commutative and satisfy (1) and (2).

In this note we prove some results on the intersection properties of maximal subfields of division algebras which are finite dimensional over their centers. These results indicate that we can get very small intersections with any subalgebra if we use the appropriate maximal subfields. As a consequence of our first theorem, we obtain some theorems which are known and some which can be obtained from these known theorems (see, for instance, Theorem 3, Chapter VII in [3]). The proofs of these known results given here are very elementary and are quite different from the ones in the literature.