  The structural and thermodynamic properties of mixtures of colloidal spheres
and non-adsorbing polymer chains are studied within a novel general
two-component macromolecular liquid state approach applicable for all size
asymmetry ratios. The dilute limits, when one of the components is at infinite
dilution but the other concentrated, are presented and compared to field theory
and models which replace polymer coils with spheres. Whereas the derived
analytical results compare well, qualitatively and quantitatively, with
mean-field scaling laws where available, important differences from ``effective
sphere'' approaches are found for large polymer sizes or semi-dilute
concentrations.

Soft Condensed Matter;Statistical Mechanics