the electric field round the machine caused by its discharge. At each
spark the frogs' legs twitched. What Galvani saw with his own eyes
seemed to be no less than the union of two phenomena, one observed by
Franklin in the heights of the atmosphere, the other by Walsh in the
depths of the sea.

Galvani, as he himself describes, proceeded with immense enthusiasm to
investigate systematically what accident had thus put into his hands.2
He wanted first to see whether changes occurring naturally in the
electrical condition of the atmosphere would call forth the same
reaction in his specimens. For this purpose he fastened one end of an
iron wire to a point high up outside his house; the lower end he
connected with the nervous substance of a limb from one of his
specimens, and to the foot of this he attached a second wire whose
other end he submerged in a well. The specimen itself was either
enclosed in a glass flask in order to insulate it, or simply left lying
on a table near the well. And all this he did whenever a thunderstorm
was threatening. As he himself reported: 'All took place as expected.
Whenever the lightning flashed, all the muscles simultaneously came
into repeated and violent twitchings, so that the movements of the
muscles, like the flash of the lightning, always preceded the thunder,
and thus, as it were, heralded its coming.' We can have some idea of
what went on in Galvani's mind during these experiments if we picture
vividly to ourselves the animal limbs twitching about every time the
lightning flashed, as if a revitalizing force of will had suddenly
taken possession of them.

In the course of his investigations - he carried them on for a long
time - Galvani was astonished to observe that some of his specimens,
which he had hung on to an iron railing by means of brass hooks,