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

From the above and other facts, we deduce that the phenom- ena of animal electric currents can only take place in a living organic tissue, and which, when once it has disappeared by rigor mortis, cannot again be produced, even when that rigidity has ceased. This is, indeed, a further proof that muscular electro- motive force, is very dependent upon the arrangement the vital- influence imparts to the organic molecules in the ultimate struc- ture of the muscle fibrils, — an arrangement that in various degrees endures for some little time after death, as also does irritability, but which disappears forever, as soon as decomposi- tion sets in, and the particles are no longer subject to the laws and force of vitality, that so absolutely rule in and over or- ganic matter. M. Matteucci supposes this to decrease at death, and the more rapidly in proportion as the animal occupies a higher rank in the scale of beings. M. Dubois-Reymond attrib- utes this difference rather to the fact that all warm-blooded animals, mammifcrous, and birds lose their muscular irritability after death much more rapidly than fishes and reptiles, and other cold-blooded animals. He lays down, therefore, as a rule, that the diminution in the animal electric current after death is proportional to the degree of natural excitability of the mus- cles ; and that the electro-motive force, as well as excitability, have for their termination the rigor mortis. M. Bruke has shown, that rigor mortis is the result of the coagulation of the fibrine contained in the bundles of muscle fibres outside the blood vessels, and that this state ceases when microscopic de- composition thaws it away. M. Do la Rive says,* " the arrangement that we assume to be imparted by the effect of the vital principle to the molecules that constitute the muscular fibre, appears to us to agree in a very remarkable manner with the statement, that the electric polar state, is due to a primitive movement of rotation, that each atom of matter possesses by endowment, around an axis, the two poles of which are positive and negative." We might conceive, he further says, that the vital principle would act by * Treatise on Electricity, vol. ii. p. 49.