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

illustrious philosophers, Galvani and Volta, there can be no shadow of doubt that the latter was wrong in denying absolutely the existence of animal electricity, because electricity was de- veloped by contact of moist metals; so was Galvani wrong in seeing the muscle contractions only in the light of an effect of animal electricity, whatever might be the condition of the ex- periment. Volta was doubtless right, as to the explanation of the facts in the first experiments of Galvani. So was Galvani right as to the fact, and law, that muscle contractions are pro- duced by the native animal electricity itself. For, by actual trial Galvani also showed that in warm-blooded animals there exist natural currents of animal electricity, directed from the extreme portions of the limbs towards the larger nerve trunks, and so on to the body. But this also was doubted for very many years, until, by the beautiful and strict researches of Dubois- Reymond, it has been completely confirmed. So was the third experiment of Galvani objected to by Volta, and rejected by the most of learned men also, because opposed by the latter on the grounds that the electric current then produced was from " con- tact " of dissimilar substances, as muscle and nerve; but, as we have shown, Galvani even succeeded at last in bringing about contractions by simply connecting the ends of the two large nerves of the frog thighs. This last result was flatly denied by Volta, but as strongly maintained by Baron Humboldt. Years passed on. A very sensitive galvanometer multiplier having now been constructed by a German philosopher, the heat and bias of old prejudices having died out with the de- parted generation, and there being now no Volta, M. Nobili, of Riggio, took up the matter for thorough work, and from first principles, where Galvani and Humboldt had left them thirty years before. He was enabled to show again, and now conclu- sively, in consequence of new facilities, that there does actually exist in the leg of the frog, naturally, an electric current, or, in other words, a nervo-electric current peculiar to the living- animal. The magnetic needle of the sensitive instrument he employed was deflected to 30°, by the current proper of the frog-. This current he found moved in the direction from the muscles to