Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.

thus left the sway of creed to prevail with the Voltaic theory for the then thirty years to come. Great novelty and furor attended the vast discoveries -which were so constantly being made on the constitution of inorganic matter, by the aid of the truly magic pile of Yolta, which was every day being modified, and in time greatly improved, so that a power was made available, that in the hands of Sir Humphry Davy, resolved many bodies, previously considered simple, into their constituent elements; and this quite changed both the nomenclature and the denominations of chemistry, creating as it were a new era in that department of science. Not only so, but still more recent, in the hands of England's Faraday, has it led to the actual discovery of new sciences, and of properties of matter before not dreamed of. But in the mean time, the very curious phenomena observed in the frog could not be entirely forgotten, or neglected, by all the thoughtful and sagacious. Signor Yalli, an Italian physician of great celebrity, commenced his researches as early as 1792, which was only one year after Galvani published his discovery, and neuro-electric theory. Dr. Valli believed the neuro-elcctric fluid to be secreted by the capillary arteries which supply the nerves, by which this fluid or ether became conveyed to the muscles,—which he believed to be always in an electric condi- tion,— the interior being negative, wbile the exterior is positive. He also pxit forth the fact, that in experimenting on frogs, the nerves lose their irritability to the stimulus of electricity, first at their origin or trunk, but retaining it longer at their pe- riphery or extremities. Upon this fact he hazarded the opinion, that probably " the distal extremities of nerves are the true origin of these structures." It is said of him that he was the first to form a battery or pile of some fourteen prepared frog thighs, and obtained thereby evidences of a true galvanic current. He publicly defended by demonstrations the almost obscured views of Galvani, by cutting the lumbar nerves of frogs high or near their exit from the vertebral canal, so as to leave them as long as could be, and then, raising them as delicately as possible with a glass rod, so as to touch a piece of any recent