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

have been convinced of that lasting alteration in the nerves, obtained in the electro-tonic state, from the action of the elec- tric current — an alteration which it was only given to Ritter, Erman, and Nobili to suspect. When a current acts upon a nerve, the latter then becomes circumstanced the same as any other wet conductor. Electrol- ysis is produced, commencing with pile-formed or pyramidal polarization. The change from a natural into a di-polar adjusts mcnt of the electro-motory molecules occasions that disturbance of equilibrium, which shows itself according to the direction of the current in a closing convulsion, or in a closing pain. It is the return from the bi-polar to the natural adjustment again, by which, to speak in Ritter's words, the organism gives to itself the opening shock. In short, this galvanic phenomenon appears to be a particular example of that discovered by Nicolson and Carlyle, then appearing so strange only on account of this par- ticular property of the animal conductor. To these observations Dubois-Reymond advances a justifica- tion for the term eleclrotonus, as applied by him to nerves and muscles. He, in the first place, reminds us of the already stated similarity that appears between the source or cause of the nerve excitement by means of the current, and that of the induction of a current-leading conductor, or magnet, to a neighboring and parallel conductor. Just as that element which produces sensation and motion does not always arise to the same degree during the continuance of the current, so the induction takes place only in consequence of positive and negative altera- tions in the electro-dynamic or magnetic resultants, acting on the conducting element. Now, as Faraday has designated that condition of the conductor, into which it has been brought by induction causes, as the electro-tonic condition, — the actual existence of which he in latter researches has been able to de- monstrate by ocular means, — so the pile-form polarization of the nerve is entitled to the designation which Faraday has thus prepared for it. When a current is produced by closing a circuit that em- braces a living nerve, it is accompanied by an excitement and