Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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of persons join hands, and then one of the number touches the electric eel, they are all equally shocked, unless some one of the number is peculiarly incapable of being affected by this fish; for there was one person, he mentions, who was a most wortliy lady acquaintance of his, who could handle this fish at her will; but, he says, the lady was at the time an invalid, laboring under a hectic fever. Tbe electric fishes, now well known to scientific men, are five kinds or more, — the Ray Torpedo, the Gymnotus Electricus, the Silurius Electricus, the Tctraodon Electricus, and the Trichivrius Electricus. Gay-Lussac, Baron Humboldt, and Davy were the next to test and publish the circumstances of these shock-discharges of the torpedo. Humboldt proved that the discharges of the gymnotus are determined from its brain, and that they entirely cease when the four great nerves lead- ing from the brain of the fish to its batteries are cut across, or when the brain is removed; this evidence is also obtained by an irritation of its spinal marrow, which is all the more signifi- cant, since the nerves of the electric organs of this fish come through the spinal marrow. From the earliest times the ray torpedo has been the object of wonder for fishermen and sailors, as being able to give a dreadful shock cither to defend itself or to kill the little fishes necessary for its food; and this property was by them often wonderfully magnified, or even imputed to various larger fish, which was the embellishing of their stories for centuries. This fish is flat, short, and broad, with a brown back and white belly, apparently swimming and living near the sandy bottom of the sea or harbors, much as do our flat fish, flounder, or halibut. But the body of this fish terminates with a more fleshy and short tail than the largest flounder. The space between the pectoral fins, the head and the gills, is quite filled, except in the very middle, with an extraordinary apparatus, called by physiolo- gists, the electric organs. These are formed of small membra- nous tubes, placed perpendicular in the animal, reaching from the belly surface to the back surface, and are packed one against the other in the utmost order of regularity, as to economy of